It's so easy for a healthy habit to get derailed by a consumerist impulse. A while ago I started journaling, and things were good. I like the Field Notes pocket notebooks, and I've been using them for a long time. I had a small surplus in a drawer, waiting to be used. Pocket notebooks are handy, and if you're in the habit of carrying a pen, then it only makes sense to carry a small notebook to go with it.
Anyway, I decided to start using my pocket notebooks for journaling. My journaling was going really well, but I started having really bad hand cramps that I couldn't seem to resolve. As a lefty, I wonder if I was just never taught really proper writing technique, but after some cursory investigation I determined that what I was doing was okay. Then I had a dangerous thought: maybe the problem is my pen? After all, aside from a space pen that I was gifted awhile ago, I've never really been someone to care much about what I was writing with. I just used whatever was lying around. Could my thoughtlessness be my downfall?
I looked into it a little bit, as one does, to try and find something more comfortable. I learned that squishy gel grips are often recommended for lefties because of the way we typically learn to hold a pen, and I thought "okay, why not?", this seems like something worth trying. The problem is, once you learn a little about something like that, it's easy to take it way too far. Now granted, I didn't completely go off the deep end, but I now own a small number of (fairly) inexpensive pens, because I was determined to try a few things in order to figure out what worked for me.
Now, this story does have a mostly happy ending, because I did find a pen I liked a lot and I stopped buying more. Further, I was successful in achieving my goal of finding something more comfortable so that I no longer suffer from hand cramps quite as quickly into my writing. But, this experience was kind of a cautionary tale of how going into something with the best of intentions can backfire due to how easy it is to get into the mindset of trying to optimize every possible little thing, even when it might not matter very much at all.
And of course by "optimize" I mean: falling down the internet rabbit hole of trying to find the "best" product to solve a particular problem, and then not being satisfied with the perfectly cromulent but unremarkable previous thing that was being used before. I do want to be satisfied with what I've already got, and I don't want to buy more stuff, as a general rule.
In this case, I am satisfied. My $30 pen experiment was money well spent because it did help me find something that allowed me to continue a healthy habit with less pain. But pens are a lot like watches: something that it's incredibly easy to take too far. I'm off the pen train. I'm not taking this one too far.
~nullish
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