Every time something ceases to be necessary, it turns into a bit of an art form. Consider old cameras, writing letters, painting portraits and so on. The fact that it's no longer necessary inflates its worth as a thoughtful gesture.

Of course, different people have different opinions about whether that's worth anything at all. You may have other preferred ways of communicating thoughtfulness.

No, you're not an exception.

I personally discovered that writing things down helps me think about them. I take copious notes for meetings and phone calls.

I've tried typing instead, but there's something about dragging a pen across the page that makes my brain work. Some others have the opposite experience.

"Why the hell you doing that," is what everyone asks. I didn't always, I just found it helped.

Eventually, I found I hated my handwriting so much I went to the trouble of doing some drills to improve it.

No, sales of pens and pencils are at lowest for a century according to freakonomics podcast (2.6bn in pencil sales this year apparently)

I was just listening to that episode this morning. They said that pencil sales had five years of consecutive decline — but sales of pens were actually rising.

That's coming off of a huge upswing in 2012, when pencil sales increased by 6.8%.

Definitely not the lowest in a century, in fact, the industry is much higher than it was fifty years ago simply due to population growth, even though per capita use may be down.

Cant trust anyone on HN these days:-)

My bad

No, my TODO list is on my phone and whenever I need to sign something I slap my signature bitmap on the PDF.

For me, typing (be it on a keyboard or a touch screen) works well. I never understood why people even consider pen based entry methods. But everyone is different, I guess.