Every San Franciscan is told to keep an earthquake bag packed and at the ready, but should they also be packing an Analog Bag?
If you’re unfamiliar with the Analog Bag, you’re either not spending time on TikTok (good for you!) or scrolling through trend pieces about how Zoomers are taking breaks from their phones by carrying totes filled with device-free ways to occupy themselves.
Parents of toddlers are already intimately familiar with this idea. A satchel packed with art supplies, books, or portable games is an essential tool for keeping kids from tantruming in restaurants or on long car rides, but in our tech-crazed era — especially in our tech-crazed city — it isn’t just children who need a bag full of distractions.
A recent stroll through Dolores Park on a sunny day revealed bags filled with notebooks, knitting, reading materials, and musical instruments. While not everyone was familiar with the Analog Bag trend, some of the people were carrying versions of them — totes packed with activities to keep them grounded in the physical world.
Felix Bishop, 28
Felix Bishop, a Bay Area native who works in childcare and in a theater’s front-of-house, typically carries a deck of cards along with notebooks in their Analog Bag. “A 200-page notebook does me well,” they said. While co-workers often think they’re writing poetry or other musings, the blank space of white pages is purely for a brain dump. “Journaling clears everything out,” they said.
Rows Cordova, 26
Rows Cordova lives close to Dolores Park and goes there regularly to unwind. Her Analog Bag has a journal with a cover by Art Nouveau master Gustav Klimt, a gift from her grandmother. She also has a pen for scribbling — alongside a Tide pen. “Because I’m messy,” she said. She keeps it beside tissues and other essentials in a smaller, clear bag. “It’s the ultimate tote bag hack.”
Cordova recently picked up a poetry book by Rumi after reading about him on the Internet. She is cautious around technology and aims for no more than three hours of screentime per day.
Katlyn Benton, 25
“I have an obsession with knitting,” confessed Katlyn Benton, a high school biology teacher. Her bag features a knitting project and a paperback copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring.
Witnessing the extent of students’ phone addiction, she’s helped them get off their phones with knitting. “Knitting club has made a huge difference,” she said. Nevertheless, “it has been a fight about phones.”
Benton estimated that of her around 100 students, there are only one or two who are into reading (and perhaps three to five who are into knitting). “Otherwise all they have to entertain themselves is their phone,” she said. “Though some of them read the Bible.”
Sarah Sheldon, 29
“I have a very hard time getting off my phone,” admitted Sarah Sheldon, a high school history teacher and a colleague of Benton’s. “It’s something I’m consciously working on.”
That’s why Sheldon has begun carrying a copy of Stephen King’s 683-page novel The Shining with her on the bus. “This is a part of my successful effort,” she said. Instead of reaching for her phone, she grabs the paperback book, a gift from her parents when she was 11 for an airplane ride. She’s glad she didn’t read it back then, though. “It has some sexually explicit stuff,” she said.
Phoebus Cotsapas, 34
Phoebus Cotsapas, a Ph.D. candidate in French literature from Stanford University, can only fit his nearly-1,300-page edition of War and Peace in his Analog Bag. Cotsapas avoids technology and doesn’t maintain any social media accounts. “They curate a flat personality,” he said. “And it feeds back into how people present in the real world, which I find disturbing.”
He also doesn’t want to be an easy target for advertisers, who can be quick to put consumers into a box with a label. But he has a complex relationship with technology, given his husband’s tech job is what has allowed him to survive a stint of unemployment from his high school teaching job.
Chauncey W.
For Chauncey W., her Analog Bag contains all items that are centralized around one technology-averting activity: playing her steel tongue drum. “We’re already living in a mixed reality,” she said. “It can help to have a practice to ground you in this physical reality.”
Her partner, who is Bulgarian, plays a multitude of musical instruments and introduced her to the drum. Chauncey likes to call it the “Silk Road” because of how it attracts strangers to her. “I’ve met so many people on my sound journey,” she said.
She told the story of a four-year-old who became so captivated by the instrument after seeing her play that she asked her mother for one.
