On one hand (heh) there's apparently evidence to suggest that handwriting activates parts of the brain which aren't typically activated by just typing something out. I can see how that would be the case and why it could sometimes be useful.
On the other, the idea of carrying a little notebook around to jot things down when I have a phone in my pocket, or using a fountain pen for longform text (trust me it would actually help you avoid hand cramps, aside from being less wasteful) all comes across as... intentionally inefficient? I struggle to see intentional inefficiency as anything but pretension. Like it's all just fetishizing living a more analogue life.
It actually makes the techbro in me think there's something to companies like Supernote and Boox and ReMarkable making e-ink tables that exist mainly so that what you do choose to write by hand can be digitized, stored and made searchable.
I suppose that's actually exactly why people tend to journal in physical notebooks? Because what you put down in there will just disappear unless you crack open that notebook again.
...Meanwhile I'm pretty sure a lot of people feel that writing things by hand gets their creative juices flowing. That's sort of interesting to me, because personally, by the time I'm finished writing a single sentence whatever I was thinking about is halfway gone. If I don't get it down real quick my thoughts will drift to something else entirely, so when I had to handwrite essays in primary school I'd get completely stuck in a way I never do just typing things.
TL;DR someone who's bad at empathy talks about handwriting as if everyone else experiences the world exactly the same way, please knock him off of his stupid pedestal
Hi, I'm sorry that I didn't see this post earlier. I'm autistic, and I have sensory processing issues, but not synesthesia.
The single biggest problem architecture causes for me is noise. Public spaces are inevitably noisy. But if the acoustics of the room are poor, then no one can hear themselves over anyone else, and everyone starts trying to talk over the room... which gets crazy pretty quickly. Independent restaurants in older buildings are the worst. Hollow plaster walls + 45 degree corners for the ceiling in some spots + a rowdy Italian family nearby with that one lady that laughs at the top of her lungs = sensory hellhole.
Extend that 10x to stadium concerts. The audio engineers crank things up so much that the sound waves bounce around until you get something like feedback from the room itself, it all just turns into a white noise assault on your eardrums and I've straight-up left concerts because of it.
Nothing is ever "quiet" for me, really. Actually, I lost it recently when a beginner guided meditation focused super hard on being aware of everything around you- that's my experience all the time and I wish I could filter things out like most people!
Shopping: Florescent lights suck. They don't bother me too much specifically, but they're a major pain point for a lot of autistic people. Personally it's just the constant traffic and unwritten "waiting for that one person to stop staring at the canned sauces shuffle".
Museums are amaaaazing. I love museums. The Boston Museum of Science is one of my favorite places. Now that I think about it, my favorite designed spaces are all either very large and spacious or very small (in the way that historical homes tended to have more small, private rooms). Anything in-between gets... like, there's enough room for stuff, and just barely room for quite a few people, and they end up even more crowded and chaotic than either of those two extremes, somehow.