It makes me feel like a freakin' wizard to pull them out and write in them. It's great. Bonus wizard points for using a nice fountain pen.

I usually actually like working with a somewhat mediocre one, I prefer my computer to have the power and specs of most of the people who will be using what I make, if it works good on mine maybe works good on theirs.

This also lets me treat computers as commodities, essentially disposable. I do not lavish a lot of care on them. Use them, keep them backed up, break them, throw them away.

But then I got this new M1, and I think it is so much better than all the other ones I normally use, including older Macs which I do not consider to have been better than any of the other computers I had. It's so good I want to go buy another one in case my wife is using it and I have to make do with another not as nice computer. To use the lesser computers is irritating to me. I feel less productive without it.

Does the feeling the tool gives you become more important than the task they are intended to perform? If that feeling is you do the task better with the tool than maybe yes.

But I like the thinkpad way more. It's sturdier, the keyboard has real keys that stick up and not these horrible chiclet macbook-style keys that every single laptop has now, it has the thinkpad nipple, you can remove/replace the battery by flipping two latches, you can access/replace the hard drive/ssd, ram, wifi card etc. By undoing 6 screws or so, and I just prefer the old thinkpad aesthetic.

I never want to "upgrade" to the modern form factor; I think it's worse in every way. When I work on the modern laptop, and then take out my thinkpad for personal computing, I feel relief at how nice it is to type on the thinkpad! It's crazy. It's very annoying to me that nobody's making laptops like that anymore. I use DWM and other lightweight tools, so the 2011 laptop is snappier than the 2022 one (programmers get worse at their jobs/adbicate any responsibility for performance faster than hardware gets better), but at some point it might be nice to have a faster processor.

It might not be just a feeling but real. Waiting for a window to open. Waiting for code to compile. Waiting for a process to finish. Vs not waiting.

I surely did notice the difference, when I aquired a gaming laptop, compared to my disposible laptops before. It was a huge boost for developing while away from the desktop (but now it is broken and I am thinking about getting an M1, too)

Notebooks are much less varied in the types of work you do with them. It's mostly pen or pencil to paper kind of work.

I find it to be worth it, considering that even premium office supplies aren't that expensive compared to other life expenses.

[1] https://amzn.to/3F1qdaG

I personally use a 3$ Pierre Cardin for class. It serves me well.

You must be young. If I used something like that at work, the young yahoos would laugh me out of the building.

I agree with you 95%. This comment is really just wanting to explain that 5%.

I have found that a little extra money goes a long way, and that a lot of money doesn't ever go far enough.

My bullet journal "daily caries" are:

* Apica CD 5mm grid notebook - $14.00 (one per year)

* Pilot Metropolitan fountain pen - $17.00 (one time purchase)

* Disposable black refills for the fountain pen - $5.00 per 20 (maybe twice a year)

In the realm of fancy pens/notebooks these are pretty cheap, but I really enjoy them. I feel like they are at a very nice sweet spot where they're cheap enough that I could lose them, but not "too good to use".

Maybe I'm lying to myself, but I feel like I journal more often because of how much I like them. It's just nice to use nice things.

I used to have a pile of coffee mugs piling up at my desk at work. Then I bought an expensive designer coffee mug and only used that one, suddenly my work area is clean.

It's about knowing how you can trick yourself to without any effort increasing your well being. I've flaws, sometimes I can buy then away by tricking myself.

I just go for a cheap and cheerful one that I am happy to write any old nonsense in

It's fun to read about this fancy and nicely designed stuff as you say, but the less fussiness around writing for me, the better.

I now use free vendor notebooks from events and random pens. And a £2 flip notebook for daily to-dos.

I generally get small ones and try to do a new one every 6 months depending on how many notes there are.

Also use a single type of pen: a black staedtler fine liner. They in a box of 10.

Years ago I took some bookbinding workshops. The guy running the program ended up making tons of books for the lessons which he ended up giving away. One of the thing he did was to scribble on the first page so it wasn’t pristine, so that the recipients wouldn’t want to use it for being “too nice”.

I took summer workshops at the North Bennet Street School in Boston. It's in the North End, right down the street from the "One if by Land, Two if by Sea" church. The workshops were fantastic, I would recommend them in a heartbeat: https://nbss.edu/

I took a bunch of them, over I think 2 summers. An intro one, one on leather binding, one on miniatures, one on Japanese binding. This was ~20 years ago, though.

It was a very rewarding activity, it feels really good to make your own books. You get to work with your hands, what you make is cool, and it's all beautiful. I'm incredibly glad I did them.

Wouldn't surprise me if the Moleskine paper is less than 70 gsm - I've got some notebooks that claim to be 70 gsm, and the paper has a bit more heft to it than the very thin, soft paper in the Moleskines. I do quite like how nice the Moleskine paper is to flick through, but the amount of bleed is a bit much, so while I do buy a Moleskine monthly diary each year - useful layout, cover feels nice, price not ridiculous, the per-month notes pages (that I typically don't use) act as an ink bleed buffer - I'd be a bit less confident that their notebooks would work as well.

For notes, I buy whatever cheap ringbound A4/A5 squared 70+ gsm paper notebooks I can find on Amazon.

A dollar spent on Moleskine paper is, sadly, a dollar wasted.

That being said, If the pens one likes to use work well on Moleskine, there's no reason why a person shouldn't use it.

Leuchtterm, Clairefontaine, Rhodia, and Tomoe River are some examples of high quality paper. If you want something that's close but quite a bit cheaper Black and Red has some options that work well even with a flexible fountain pen.

I prefer the larger sized, thinner pages books for this reason, I can care less and still take loads of notes

While the Field Notes limited editions are blatantly collectibles, most are similar enough to the standard items to just use. Get one of the fancy leather covers if you worry about damaging them, then stick it in your pocket when you need to take a note. (Given most are the same price as their standard notebooks, it's really more of a fun little decoration for the everyday tool.)

And a Fisher AG7 is just handy to clip to the notebook in your pocket, so you always have a normal-feeling ballpoint pen that will always work. It's the only pen I've managed to hold onto long enough to get refills.

Long story short you buy these things as jewellery and not as tools.

Plain old notebook available in any nearby store works for me. And yeah any pen works too.

I instead just got myself a cheap detective-style notepad I can keep in my pocket to write down all the crap the comes to mind, everywhere I am, even while standing up. That's exactly what I need.

You might find that you enjoy the quality of paper of other notebooks, but it gets you over that "this notebook is too nice for my random thought"-block.

More permanent: generic A5 sketchbooks from artist materials shops. Typically 80 leaves of 100g/m^2 off white plain paper and board covers with sewn signature bindings. Around a fiver each.

Recently discovered somewhere in the middle: Muji 'Pocketnote' A5 plain notebooks with paper covers and a lot of leaves (over 100). Flexible, thin shiny pages (no good for sharpies/gel/ink) but cheapish around three pounds and a nice feel.

None of these are so expensive to become precious.

The choice of notebook impacts your productivity. As you yourself admit.

The notebook that works best for someone depends on the person. Your reaction to Moleskine notebooks is particular to you.

"Better" is what is better for the individual.