Making espresso takes longer than it should. You grind the beans precisely, then tamp the grounds (not to ‘block’ the water, but to ensure a perfectly level bed so the pressure doesn’t find a path of least resistance and channel through). A flat, even seal. Then, ensure the group head is purged and the water is PID-stabilized at 90-96°C. Lock the portafilter in, flip the lever, and the pump engages. There is no ‘waiting’ for pressure to build in the air; the pressure is a sudden, violent 9-bar weight meeting the resistance of the cake. You now watch the bottomless portafilter for even, uninterrupted flow and track the shot by time and yield, cutting it as the stream begins to pale and thin. The process demands attention, yes. If you check your phone and miss the scale hitting 36 grams by even three seconds, the balance between acidity and bitterness is ruined. The machine did exactly what it was told; the culprit is your own distraction. Sure, Nespresso exists, it’s faster and predictably convenient, but nobody who owns a manual machine is optimizing for speed. They chose it because the ‘inefficiency’ is actually the craft. The moment you automate the ritual, you’re just consuming a product. The friction of the process is the entire point.
A syphon brewer, which I’m personally fond of, is even more absurd. Water is heated in a lower chamber until vapor pressure forces it up through a tube into an upper chamber where it mixes with coffee grounds, then the heat is removed and the brewed coffee gets pulled back down through a filter by gravity and the vacuum created as the vapor condenses. It’s a science experience on the counter, really. It takes fifteen minutes and requires one to stand there the whole time making sure the flame doesn’t go out or burn too hot, adjusting the heat, watching the water climb and fall, timing everything by sight and intuition because if you walk away it will either over-extract or under-extract, and you’ll know immediately when you taste it, that you weren’t paying attention. There is no reason to brew coffee this way except that the process itself becomes meditative, something that is done with the coffee rather than something done to it, and when you finally pour the result into a cup and drink it, the taste is inseparable from the effort. It is earned.
Vinyl records demand the same kind of presence — there are no playlists or queued up songs from an algorithm. First, one should choose a record, place it on the turntable, clean it if necessary, lower the needle, carefully, and then flip it halfway through. Also, the album has sides. Structure. And when side A ends, you’re forced to make a decision: flip it, or do something else? It’s more of a feature than a technological flaw — by keeping you conscious of what you’re listening to, music doesn’t get to become ambient noise. Spotify eliminated this friction entirely. You press play and the music never stops, songs bleeding into each other based on what the algorithm thinks you want to hear next, and you can listen for hours without once thinking about what you’re actually listening to because the system is designed to keep you passive, to keep you consuming without engaging. The ritual of vinyl forces engagement and makes listening an active decision rather than a default state.
Manual transmission works the same way. Driving a manual means you’re always aware of what the car is doing. You can feel the engine and anticipate the gear change before the car needs it, as you match the revs on downshifts not because the car immediately requires it but because doing it smoothly feels better than letting the synchros do the work. Every stop, every acceleration, every corner, all require input. You can’t drift off. You can’t let your mind wander too far because the car will remind you immediately that you’re not paying attention — it’ll bog down if you’re in too high a gear, lurch if you release the clutch too fast, protest if you try to shift without engaging properly. The car doesn’t let you be passive; it demands that you drive it, not just aim it in a direction and let it handle the details. This is why people who love manual transmissions can’t articulate the appeal to people who don’t; it’s not about going faster or being more efficient, it’s about the relationship between driver and machine, the way the act of driving becomes something you’re conscious of instead of something that just happens while you think about work or listen to a podcast. An automatic transmission eliminates all of this. You put it in drive and the car does everything else, and for most people that’s fine, that’s preferable even, because driving is just a means to an end and they want to think about other things. But the people who choose manual aren’t choosing it despite the extra effort, because the extra effort is what creates engagement, and engagement is what makes the act feel meaningful instead of incidental.
Ford’s PowerShift transmission is what happens when you try to automate badly. It wasn’t a true automatic, it was a dual-clutch automated manual, a transmission that tried to give you the fuel efficiency of a manual with the convenience of an automatic and delivered neither. The system was supposed to shift faster and more efficiently than a human could, but in practice it hesitated, jerked, overheated in traffic, shuddered during low-speed maneuvers, and it failed catastrophically often enough that Ford faced class-action lawsuits and eventually stopped using it. The PowerShit wasn’t bad because it was automatic, it was bad because it tried to fake the benefits of a manual transmission while removing everything that made a manual worth driving. It automated the process without understanding what the process was for: a traditional automatic with a torque converter is honest about what it is: a system designed to make driving effortless. You sacrifice some efficiency and some control, but you gain convenience and smoothness. A manual is honest too, because it gives you control and engagement in exchange for effort. The PowerShift tried to have it both ways and ended up with the worst of both, an unreliable automation that still required you to tolerate the harshness of clutch engagement without any of the satisfaction of actually controlling it yourself. It’s the mechanical equivalent of making coffee with a machine that’s too complicated to be convenient but not involving enough to feel like you’re making anything. You’re just standing there watching it fail.
Photography is interesting because it’s where the ritual logic starts to break down for me, or at least where it becomes less clear. Film photography has all the markers of meaningful ritual — the film is loaded in, with a limited number of shots so every frame has to count, and you can’t see the results immediately so there’s anticipation and uncertainty, then you develop the negatives yourself if you’re committed enough, and the whole process is slow and deliberate and demands attention. People who shoot film talk about it the same way people talk about vinyl or manual cars, like the limitations are what make it valuable, like friction creating presence. And I get that. I understand the appeal intellectually. But I’m not a photographer and I don’t have a photography practice, so when I think about taking pictures the question that comes up is: why wouldn’t I just edit them digitally? Editing takes time too, requires attention, you’re essentially making decisions about exposure and color and composition, and if you do it carefully it’s just as much of a process as developing film, maybe more because you have more control over the final result. So why is one ritual considered authentic and the other considered lazy? Is it just the tactile element? The fact that film is physical and digital is abstract? Or is it because film carries the cultural weight of being “the old way” and therefore feels more legitimate, more serious, even if the actual effort involved isn’t that different? I don’t have an answer to this, and when I think about it I can’t land on a satisfying conclusion, which makes me suspect that not all rituals are equal (!), or at least that some rituals resonate with certain people and not others based on factors that have nothing to do with the ritual itself and everything to do with what the ritual represents or what cultural story it’s embedded in.
The term for all of this is analog fetish. The romanticization of older, slower, more physically demanding ways of doing things that have been rendered technically obsolete but persist because they offer something the replacement doesn’t. And it’s worth asking whether that something is real or imagined, whether the satisfaction comes from the ritual itself or from the identity of being someone who performs the ritual. If you make espresso with a manual machine, are you doing it because the process genuinely makes the coffee taste better to you, or are you doing it because you like being the kind of person who makes espresso with a manual machine? If you drive a manual transmission, is it because the engagement actually enhances your experience of driving, or is it because you want to feel like someone who knows how to drive properly, someone who hasn’t been softened by convenience? Is it because automatic cars are more expensive in your country? These questions aren’t accusations. They’re just questions. I think the answer can be both, and I think you can genuinely enjoy the ritual and also enjoy the identity that comes with it, as those two things don’t have to be in conflict. But it’s worth being honest about which one you’re actually after, because if it’s mostly the identity then you’re just performing for an imagined audience, and that’s fine, people do that all the time, but it’s different from actually valuing the thing itself. What’s undeniable, though, is that rituals — real ones, that demand presence and effort and can’t be shortcut without losing the entire point — do something that automation doesn’t. They force you to be conscious. And consciousness, it turns out, is what most of modern life is designed to eliminate. Everything is frictionless now. Everything is optimized. Everything happens in the background while you do something else. Your phone updates itself. Your subscriptions renew automatically. Your navigation recalculates the route without asking if you wanted to take a different way. The coffee brews itself on a timer. The car shifts itself. Even pianos play themselves. And all of this is supposed to be progress, supposed to free you up to focus on more important things, but what it actually does is make you less present, less engaged, and less aware of what you’re doing or why you’re doing it. The rituals that refuse to be automated are valuable precisely because they resist this. They say, “no, you have to be here for this, you have to participate”, and in a world that increasingly treats your attention as something to be captured and redirected toward whatever generates the most profit, choosing to engage consciously with something that doesn’t scale or optimize with automation, starts to feel like a form of cultural resistance.
Not that it matters. Not that any of this changes anything. The world will keep eliminating friction and making everything faster or easier and less demanding, and most people will go along with it because most people just want things to work without having to think about them. And that’s fine. That’s well within reason. Not everyone needs to check a to-do list in order to have their coffee, but for the people who do and choose the longer, harder, less efficient way of doing something not because they’re trying to prove anything but because the process itself matters to them, there’s something there that can’t be replicated by pressing a button and waiting. Some small, stubborn insistence that not everything should be easy, that effort has value, and that the things worth doing are sometimes worth doing precisely because they demand more of you than they have to. Which, when you say it out loud, sounds like the kind of thing that looks from the outside like wasting time on purpose, but feels better than not doing it, even if you can’t explain why. Maybe especially if you can’t explain why.
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