Shaughnessy Barker hosts tech-free craft nights with her friends. Her home setup would puzzle most people under 40: a landline telephone with an adapter, an extensive collection of vinyl records and cassettes, handwritten notes scattered on surfaces. When she leaves the house, she uses a “dumb phone” app that strips her smartphone down to basic functions. She describes herself, without irony, as “an AI hater to my core.”^[1]

The contradiction hits when she admits how she promotes this analog lifestyle: through TikTok. “I’m a walking oxymoron,” she says, “being like, ‘I want to get off my phone and I’m going to make TikToks about it.’”^[2]

But Barker isn’t alone in her exhaustion with digital life. Searches for “analog hobbies” increased 136% in just six months. Sales of guided craft kits jumped 86% in 2025, with projections for another 30-40% increase this year. Searches for yarn kits–those “grandma hobbies”–exploded by 1,200%.^[3] People are buying film cameras, vinyl records, and fountain pens. They’re hosting tech-free gatherings and writing letters by hand.

An AI researcher at UC Riverside captured the fatigue driving this movement: “AI slop is quite fatiguing both in the actual action of viewing the content and the fact that it’s so repetitive, so unoriginal.”^[4]

What’s driving this exodus from digital into analog? And what does the analog lifestyle and Sabbath rest have in common? More than we might think.

The Exhaustion is Real

Before we explore what the gospel says about this cultural moment, we need to acknowledge that the exhaustion is genuine. People aren’t fleeing digital life because they’re nostalgic Luddites who romanticize the past. They’re exhausted by what technology has become.

AI-generated content floods everything. Social media feeds, search results, even academic papers and news articles–all saturated with what people are calling “AI slop.”^[5] Content that’s technically competent but spiritually empty. Repetitive. Unoriginal. Fatiguing to consume because it lacks the signature of actual human creativity.

Constant connectivity promised to bring us together. Instead, it’s delivered a peculiar form of isolation–surrounded by notifications but starved for presence. We’re in constant contact but rarely truly connected. The algorithms that govern our feeds decide what we see, what we buy, what we think about. Our agency feels diminished. We’re not choosing our digital lives; they’re being chosen for us.

And then there’s the growing awareness of surveillance capitalism. Every click, every scroll, every pause gets harvested. We’re not the customers–we’re the product being sold to advertisers. One person choosing the analog lifestyle put it this way: “Going analog is not necessarily about cutting myself off from the information on the internet, but it’s more so about cutting the internet off from the information about me.”^[6]

Everything has been optimized for efficiency. But efficiency for what? Productivity. Output. Engagement metrics. Nothing has been optimized for human flourishing. We’re more efficient than ever and more exhausted than ever, and we’re starting to suspect these two facts are connected.

What the Analog Turn Reveals

Beneath the surface of this cultural trend lies something deeper than a preference for aesthetics or a reaction against modernity. The analog lifestyle movement reveals core hungers about what it means to be human.

The exhaustion is quantifiable. Gen Z averages 7.2 hours looking at content online each day. Over half of teenagers receive 237 or more notifications daily–some receive over 5,000.^[7] Digital fatigue isn’t a character flaw; it’s a physiological reality. Researchers have identified “directed attention fatigue”–the state when the part of your brain responsible for focus becomes exhausted from constant digital stimulation.^[8] The symptoms are physical: tension headaches, eye strain, difficulty concentrating, diminished creativity.^[9]

And people are pushing back. Searches on Pinterest for “digital detox ideas” jumped 72% in 2025, while searches for “digital detox vision boards” surged 273%. Nearly half of Gen Z now limit their screen time in some way.^[10] This isn’t nostalgia–it’s survival.

People are hungry for embodied presence. They want to engage the physical world tactilely–to feel yarn between their fingers, to smell ink on paper, to hear the crackle of a vinyl record. Digital life mediates everything through screens. The analog turn is a hunger to touch the world directly again.

There’s a desire for human agency rather than algorithmic determinism. Consumers are showing “growing resistance to algorithmic control in favour of more human experiences.”^[11] When an algorithm decides what you see, when AI generates your content, when your attention is being sold to the highest bidder, choosing to write with a fountain pen or develop film becomes an act of resistance. It declares: I’m not just a node in someone else’s network. I have agency.

The longing for authentic creativity surfaces everywhere in this movement. Negative sentiment toward AI-generated content reached 54% in late 2025.^[12] Research shows that simply labeling an ad as AI-generated makes people see it as “less natural and less useful,” lowering purchase intent.^[13] Seventy percent of Gen Z have abandoned a platform, app, or website because it felt fake.^[14] AI can generate images, write prose, compose music. But people sense something hollow in it. The analog turn toward crafts, handwriting, physical art-making is a reaching for creativity that flows from being, not just from processing data. It’s wanting to make something that bears the mark of an actual person.

And underneath it all is a rebellion against pace. Everything digital moves fast–instant messages, rapid scrolling, constant updates. The analog lifestyle chooses slowness. Not because slow is inherently virtuous, but because some things require time and depth that speed destroys. You can’t rush knitting. You can’t speed-run developing film. The inconvenience is the point.

What emerges is a pattern: people are willing to pay for inconvenience because efficiency hasn’t delivered flourishing. They’re choosing slower, harder, less optimal ways of doing things because they’ve discovered that optimization isn’t making them more human–it’s making them less.

The gospel has something to say about this hunger. In fact, the gospel has been saying it for two thousand years.

The Word Became Flesh

“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). When God chose to redeem humanity, he didn’t send a message. He didn’t optimize the process. He became flesh–took on a body, entered physical existence, engaged the material world.

Jesus had a real body. He got hungry and tired. He wept. He touched lepers. He broke bread with his hands. The incarnation is God’s ultimate statement about the goodness and importance of physical, embodied existence.

This matters for how we think about the analog lifestyle and Sabbath. The Christian faith is not a religion of escape from the physical into the spiritual. Early in church history, a heresy called Gnosticism taught exactly that–the material world is evil, the spiritual world is good, and salvation means escaping from body into pure spirit. The church rejected this forcefully.

Instead, Christianity declares that creation is “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Bodies matter. The physical world matters. So much so that when Christ rose from the dead, he rose bodily. The disciples could touch him, eat with him (Luke 24:36-43). Our future hope isn’t disembodied souls floating in clouds–it’s resurrected bodies in a new creation.

Digital life can tend toward a kind of modern Gnosticism. We live through screens rather than in the world. We consume information without touching anything. Our relationships happen through mediation rather than presence. The incarnation challenges this. If God himself chose embodiment, if he dignified physical existence by taking it on, then the analog movement’s emphasis on tactile, embodied engagement echoes something deeply true about how we’re made.

The hunger to engage the physical world with our hands, to create things that require our bodies, to be present in space rather than just connected through wires–this isn’t nostalgia. It’s a recovery of incarnational existence. We’re made to be embodied, and something in us knows when that’s being denied.

Sabbath as Divine Resistance

But the gospel speaks to this moment in another way too: through the ancient practice of Sabbath.

God commanded Israel to rest one day in seven (Exodus 20:8-11). Not suggested. Not recommended. Commanded. For twenty-four hours every week, they were to cease all productive labor. No work. No optimization. No output.

This was revolutionary. One day per week you prove that your worth isn’t tied to your productivity. You demonstrate that you’re valuable even when you’re not producing anything. Sabbath is God’s protest against the lie that human worth equals human output.

In Deuteronomy, God adds another layer. Israel is to keep Sabbath “that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you. You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 5:14-15). Sabbath is resistance to slave economies. Egypt’s system demanded endless production. Freedom means you can rest. Sabbath declares: you’re not slaves anymore.

Jesus reaffirmed this when he said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). Rest is a gift, not a burden. It exists for our good.

We’ve lost Sabbath in the church, and we wonder why we’re exhausted. We’ve accepted the cultural narrative that busy equals important, that constant productivity proves our value. We’ve bought the lie that if we’re not optimizing every hour, we’re wasting time.

The analog lifestyle movement is recovering something profoundly Sabbath-like. When someone chooses to knit rather than scroll, to write letters rather than send texts, to listen to vinyl rather than stream optimized playlists, they’re practicing a kind of resistance. They’re saying: efficiency isn’t ultimate. Speed isn’t virtue. I can engage the world slowly, deliberately, inefficiently–and that’s not only okay, it’s good.

But here’s what the culture doesn’t know: Sabbath can’t just be a wellness hack. It can’t be self-care separated from worship. Sabbath is commanded rest that reorients us to who God is and who we are. We rest because God rested. We cease producing because God declared us valuable apart from our production. Sabbath done right is worship–an acknowledgment that we’re creatures, not Creator, and that our worth comes from being loved by God, not from our output.

The church should be leading the recovery of Sabbath, not following culture’s rediscovery of rest. We have the theological grounding that the analog lifestyle movement lacks. We know why rest matters. We know what we’re resting from and what we’re resting for.

You’re Not an Algorithm

There’s another hunger the analog movement reveals: the need to know we’re not replaceable by machines.

Genesis declares that humans are made in God’s image (Genesis 1:26-27). Not because we’re efficient. Not because we’re optimized. Not because we produce the most output. We bear God’s image because we reflect his character in ways no other creature does. We love, we create, we enter covenant relationships, we worship. These aren’t functions–they’re expressions of being made in the image of a personal God.

AI can simulate creativity. It can optimize output. It can predict behavior with frightening accuracy. But an algorithm can’t image God. It can’t love. It can’t worship. It can’t enter the kind of relationship God designed us for.

The unease people feel about AI-generated content isn’t irrational fear. It’s an intuition that something essential is missing. When we consume AI-generated art or writing or music, we sense the absence of a soul behind it. There’s no person who made choices shaped by their particular history, their particular loves, their particular way of seeing the world.

The analog lifestyle’s emphasis on handmade, human-created things is a reaching for something algorithms can’t provide: the signature of an actual person. When someone knits a sweater, every stitch carries the mark of their hands, their choices, their care. When someone writes a letter by hand, the handwriting itself–imperfect, unique–testifies to a particular human being.

Jesus dignified manual work. He was a carpenter (Mark 6:3), spending his adult years working with wood, creating physical things with his hands. The incarnate God affirmed that physical creativity matters, that making things is part of imaging God.

We’re not algorithms. We’re image-bearers. Our creativity flows from being made by a Creator, not from processing data. The analog movement senses this truth, even if it can’t fully articulate it. The gospel names what we know in our bones: we’re made for something AI can never replicate.

Stewardship of Attention

Paul writes, “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time” (Ephesians 5:15-16). We’re called to be careful stewards of how we live. That includes stewardship of our attention.

What we give our attention to shapes us. This isn’t new–it’s why the Psalmist could write “I will not set before my eyes anything that is worthless” (Psalm 101:3). But it’s newly urgent in an age when human attention has become “the principal object of economic capture and commodification.”^[15]

The numbers are staggering. The global digital advertising industry was expected to exceed $700 billion by 2025, with social media advertising accounting for nearly 35% of that figure.^[16] In 2022 alone, Google and Meta earned a combined $341 billion in advertising revenue.^[17] This isn’t incidental. The attention economy “treats cognitive focus as a scarce resource to be algorithmically extracted, packaged, and monetized by dominant technology platforms.”^[18]

The average American is exposed to 4,000 to 10,000 advertisements every day.^[19] The average worker receives 117 emails daily.^[20] High-interruption workers are interrupted roughly every two minutes–about 275 pings per day.^[21] Every notification, every email, every ad “consumes attention, context, and decision energy.”^[22]

Tech companies employ psychologists to make their products as addictive as possible. The business model requires it–attention equals money. These platforms have “engineered an ecosystem where every interaction is carefully designed to maximize engagement, not for the benefit of the user, but for the profitability of the companies collecting and monetizing their data.”^[23] The attention economy “thrives on addiction, using algorithmic reinforcement to keep users engaged at the cost of their mental well-being.”^[24]

The problems aren’t about individual lack of self-control. They’re about technological and market design. The system is optimized to keep us engaged, not to help us flourish.

The analog lifestyle movement represents a form of stewardship. People are reclaiming agency over their attention. They’re choosing what to focus on rather than letting algorithms make that choice for them. They’re protecting their minds from constant stimulation.

The church should be teaching this. Digital discipleship isn’t optional in 2026–it’s essential. We should be helping people think about technology abstinence, about Sabbath from screens, about the renewal of mind that Paul calls us to (Romans 12:2). What we consume shapes us. If we’re formed by algorithm-driven feeds, constant notifications, and AI-generated content, we’ll be shaped into something less than God designed.

This doesn’t mean rejecting technology entirely. It means thoughtful stewardship. Some people might need radical measures–getting rid of smartphones, going mostly analog. Others might need rhythms and boundaries–screen-free evenings, weekly digital Sabbaths, intentional limits.

The goal is freedom. Not freedom from technology, but freedom to use it without being used by it. Freedom to engage the digital world when it serves genuine connection and flourishing, and to step away when it doesn’t.

Beyond Aesthetics to Worship

Here’s the danger: the analog lifestyle can become a new form of legalism. It can turn into aesthetic performance. Instagram-worthy vinyl collections. Perfectly curated bookshelves of unread hardcovers. Fountain pens as status symbols rather than tools.

The church has a long history of turning good things into new works-righteousness. We can’t do that here. The gospel offers freedom, not new rules. Some Christians can engage technology fully without it becoming enslaving. Others need radical simplicity. Both can be faithful stewardship.

What matters isn’t whether you use a smartphone or a dumb phone, whether you stream music or play vinyl, whether you type or write by hand. What matters is whether you’re stewarding your attention, your time, and your embodied existence in ways that honor God and help you flourish.

The analog lifestyle shouldn’t become a marker of superior spirituality. We shouldn’t create a new Pharisaism where “real Christians” do things the hard way while “worldly Christians” use technology. That’s the opposite of gospel freedom.

But the church should help people discern where technology serves them and where it enslaves them. We should create space for conversations about digital discipleship. We should model embodied worship–gathered physically, singing with our actual voices, taking communion with our hands. We should recover Sabbath as worship, not wellness.

The goal isn’t an analog lifestyle. The goal is worship of God with our whole selves–including our bodies, our attention, our creativity, our time. If analog practices help you do that, embrace them. If technology helps you do that, use it well. The point isn’t the means–it’s the end.

The Recovery We Need

The analog lifestyle movement is onto something true. Digital saturation is exhausting us. Algorithmic life is dehumanizing us. Endless optimization is costing us our humanity. People are right to rebel against this.

But the gospel gives deeper grounding than wellness trends can provide. We’re not just tired–we’re living against the grain of how God made us. We’re made for embodied existence because God himself took on flesh. We’re made for rest because God commanded Sabbath. We’re made to be image-bearers, not algorithms. We’re called to steward our attention, not surrender it to whoever bids highest.

The church should be leading this recovery. We have theological resources the culture lacks. We know why embodiment matters–because of the incarnation. We know why rest matters–because of Sabbath. We know why human creativity matters–because of the imago Dei. We know why stewardship of attention matters–because transformation comes through the renewal of our minds.

But we’ve been following culture instead of leading it. We’ve accepted busyness as virtue. We’ve traded embodied worship for streamed services. We’ve let screens mediate our community. We’ve lost Sabbath and wondered why we’re as exhausted as the world around us.

The analog movement is hungry for what we should be offering. They want embodied presence. We worship an embodied God. They want rest that isn’t just productivity optimization. We have Sabbath. They want authentic creativity that bears the mark of a person. We serve the Creator who made us in his image.

What would it look like for the church to be a people who rest deeply because we know our worth isn’t in our output? Who engage the physical world with delight because God called it “very good”? Who create things with our hands because we’re imaging a Creator God? Who use technology thoughtfully because we’re stewards of attention, not slaves to algorithms?

The analog lifestyle movement is hungry for this. The gospel offers it. Will the church lead the way?

Questions for Reflection

• Where has technology moved from serving you to enslaving you? What would it look like to reclaim agency over your attention and time?
• How has your church community prioritized efficiency and programs over embodied presence and rest? What might it look like to recover Sabbath as worship rather than productivity optimization?
• In what ways have you lost touch with physical, embodied engagement with the world? What tangible, analog practices might help you recover incarnational existence?
• How do you discern the difference between faithful stewardship of technology and falling into new legalism about analog practices?

Prayer Points

• For Digital Exhaustion: Pray for those experiencing burnout from constant connectivity and AI saturation, that God would lead them to genuine rest and teach them wise stewardship of attention and technology.
• For the Church: Pray that local churches would recover embodied worship, Sabbath rest, and digital discipleship–leading culture rather than following it in understanding what it means to be human in a digital age.
• For Wisdom in Technology Use: Pray for discernment about when technology serves human flourishing and when it dehumanizes, and for courage to resist cultural pressure toward constant optimization and connectivity.
• For Recovery of Sabbath: Pray that God’s people would rediscover Sabbath as divine gift and resistance to productivity worship, demonstrating to a watching world that our worth isn’t tied to our output.

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^[1]Ramishah Maruf, “Tired of AI, people are committing to the analog lifestyle in 2026,” CNN Business, January 18, 2026, https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/18/business/crafting-soars-ai-analog-wellness.

^[2]Maruf, “Tired of AI.”

^[3]Maruf, “Tired of AI.”

^[4]Maruf, “Tired of AI.”

^[5]“How ‘Trend Fatigue’ Is Reshaping Beauty in 2026,” Barefaced (Substack), https://barefaced.substack.com/p/how-trend-fatigue-is-reshaping-beauty.

^[6]Maruf, “Tired of AI.”

^[7]Tim Middleton, “TMW #234 | The Digital Fatigue Generation,” The Martech Weekly, August 13, 2025, https://themartechweekly.com/tmw-234-the-digital-fatigue-generation/.

^[8]“The Science Of Digital Fatigue On Behavioral And Mental Health: Mental Health Awareness In 2025,” Doral Health & Wellness, October 7, 2025, https://doralhw.org/the-science-of-digital-fatigue-on-behavioral-and-mental-health-mental-health-awareness-in-2025/.

^[9]“The Science Of Digital Fatigue,” Doral Health & Wellness.

^[10]Middleton, “TMW #234 | The Digital Fatigue Generation.”

^[11]“How ‘Trend Fatigue’ Is Reshaping Beauty in 2026,” Barefaced.

^[12]“How ‘Trend Fatigue’ Is Reshaping Beauty in 2026,” Barefaced.

^[13]“How ‘Trend Fatigue’ Is Reshaping Beauty in 2026,” Barefaced.

^[14]“How ‘Trend Fatigue’ Is Reshaping Beauty in 2026,” Barefaced.

^[15]“The Attention Economy and the Collapse of Cognitive Autonomy,” Georgetown Law Denny Center for Democratic Capitalism, https://www.law.georgetown.edu/denny-center/blog/the-attention-economy/.

^[16]“The Attention Economy and the Collapse of Cognitive Autonomy,” Georgetown Law Denny Center.

^[17]“The Attention Economy and the Collapse of Cognitive Autonomy,” Georgetown Law Denny Center.

^[18]“The Attention Economy and the Collapse of Cognitive Autonomy,” Georgetown Law Denny Center.

^[19]Shane, “Understanding the Attention Economy and its Negative Effects,” Intertext, Syracuse University, 2025, https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1531&context=intertext.

^[20]“14 Subscription Fatigue Statistics to Know in 2026,” Readless Blog, https://www.readless.app/blog/subscription-fatigue-statistics-2026.

^[21]“14 Subscription Fatigue Statistics,” Readless Blog.

^[22]“14 Subscription Fatigue Statistics,” Readless Blog.

^[23]Laeila Scott, “The Ethics of Exploitation: How Social Media Profits from Attention, Addiction, and Data Manipulation,” NSU Undergraduate Law Journal, Vol. 1, 2025, https://nsuworks.nova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=nulj.

^[24]Scott, “The Ethics of Exploitation.”