Maybe this sounds familiar: You have a notebook, possibly bound in leather, or with gilt edges, or monogrammed. (Or all three, because restraint in the face of notebooks is hard to come by.) The pages flip satisfyingly in your hand, it’s lined or unlined just like you like it, and the thick paper would be a dream to write on. But you haven’t, right? Not once. (I know, I’ve got a stack of them too.)
And whether it’s the gift card that has survived two wallets or the “good” olive oil you’re saving for a meal that will finally deserve it, it always ends the same way. The good oil goes bad, the gift card is worthless when the store goes out of business, and the notebook makes you feel so guilty that you eventually have to hide it from yourself.
Science says that’s not the notebook’s fault.
The Less You Use It, the More Special It Feels
In their 2021 study, researchers Jacqueline Rifkin and Jonah Berger looked at how choosing not to use something, no matter how ordinary it might be, inflates the value we give that item, making it harder and harder to ever use it in the future. It all hinges on the story you tell yourself about why you didn’t use it: if you lost the notebook or your pen ran out of ink, then it’s still just a regular notebook, no harder to use tomorrow. However, if you decided to wait for the right moment, that tiny act of restraint makes the notebook feel special. You’d assume that’s because it was special all along, but Rifkin and Berger found that it actually goes in the opposite direction. The object becomes special only because you haven’t used it.
To test this, they ran an experiment with an ordinary, inexpensive notebook. They asked 121 participants to take notes or solve puzzles, and let them choose between a brand-new notebook or scrap paper. The ones who passed on using the notebook the first time around were measurably less likely to write in it at all, as if it were too pristine to mess up. Rifkin and Berger called this the Specialness Spiral.
Across six studies, the researchers found that participants created specialness out of thin air, no matter how little the item was worth. Even a $12 bottle of Pinot Noir got mentally promoted to “too good for a Tuesday” the second someone decided to save it for later. And once your brain labels something as special, it raises the bar for when you allow yourself to use it. So you end up waiting for an occasion grand enough to match the incredibly high status that you invented for it, but since perfect days rarely happen, the item stays trapped in storage forever. (Are you now wondering what they did with those 121 notebooks from the study? And how we can get our hands on them? Me too.)
Still, that doesn’t quite explain the deeper reason a blank notebook is so hard to open in the first place. For that we need to go all the way back to Aristotle, who was thinking about this roughly twenty-three centuries before anyone thought to hand strangers a free notebook and study the effect.
The Trouble With Pure Potential
Aristotle drew a line between what a thing could be and what a thing actually is. Dynamis (potentiality) is the capacity to become something, and energeia (actuality) is the thing out there just being it. If the sculpture is the energeia, then the block of raw marble is the dynamis. And the blank notebook is about as pure as dynamis gets.
Inside it, you could write a novel that wins the Booker Prize, or create a business plan that changes the industry, or even draft a to-do list where every single task gets crossed off. (Can you imagine?!?) Anything is possible in a blank notebook, absolutely anything, and while it’s blank, they all exist together at the same time. Which is precisely the problem, because writing one of those things means giving up the potential of the others.
Aristotle, however, didn’t care about potential. To him, the finished thing was the only thing that mattered, and a grocery list you completed would beat a novel you never started every time.
In fact, Aristotle would have had no patience for a cosmos that keeps branching instead of concluding, one timeline breeding the next breeding the one after that, every hero recast and resurrected across a dozen versions of himself, no death permanent, no choice final, no stakes real, because anything that happens in one version can be undone in another. Infinite possibility forever, and not one second of it that finally matters. To Aristotle that isn’t richness, it’s the emptiest thing going: all potential, no substance. (Something tells me that Aristotle would have hated the Marvel multiverse.)
Which is a long way of getting back to the notebook on your shelf. It’s ready whenever you are. It’s the pen that’s the problem.
