In the 1500s, Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam materialised the beginning of life with the almost-touch of two fingertips — God gracing Adam with the spark of life.

On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs took to the stage at Macworld and announced to an audience: “We’re going to use the best pointing device in the world. We’re going to use a pointing device that we’re all born with — born with ten of them. We’re going to use our fingers. We’re going to touch this with our fingers…It works like magic.”

The hands, once used to tracing the contours and edges of buttons, moved to smooth screen technology. The new order called for less power in the hands, more in the object — a transference of responsibility, we believed was necessary and clever. And doesn’t our new reality reflect this? Are we not constantly talking about how disconnected we are — so out of touch? Our thumbs may be active and eager, but ultimately, our hands are changed, much like our teeth or mouth, through advancements in cooking and the use of cutlery.

Today, even our ideas are not quite tangible. They may appear on screens and seem real, but do they feel real? Are they not 2D, beyond grasp?

The first language

Touch is one of the first senses we develop.

“Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth,” wrote Margaret Atwood in her novel The Blind Assassin(2000).

Before words and abstractions, tools and algorithms, cognition was built through touch. When we try our hardest to materialise something from our heads — through writing, drawing, building — we build neural pathways, creating scaffolding for recognition, making them stick in our memory. The hand teaches the brain how to think.

To my one-year-old niece, I gently nudge, “Can you show me where your eyes are? What about your ears? … And your hair?” — the line of inquiry remaining consistent. She answers in babbles and caricatures of words, but she mostly points. Her chubby fingers trace her face, sometimes missing, sometimes landing true. When she thinks she’s right, she claps. She assembles her world through touch — her pop-up books, building blocks, and the toys she grasps and throws.

Deliberations never end on the origin of language, but the consensus goes that before tongue and sound, the hand spoke — through touch and gestures. Eventually, we put pen to paper, articulating our every thought. Neuroscientist Audrey van der Meer points out that kids who learn through tablets or laptops have a harder time discerning between letters that may appear alike. “They literally haven’t felt with their bodies what it feels like to produce those letters.” Writing by hand slows the mind just enough to make thinking deliberate.

Through the human hand, we make sense of the world. Upon examination, you may discover just how much — you may rotate your wrist, play with your fingers mimicking a song on the piano, when you bend some and contort others, you may make shapes and animals. You may ball up your fist, and it will mirror the size of your heart. With these same hands, we grasp and outline, push and pull, make and protect.

Through their extraordinary ability to feel and interpret touch, humans stand sensorially distinct. Evolutionarily, the hands found great purpose once we began walking on two legs. At the end of our arms were tools that could gather food, chop wood, carry water, care for the community, defend and build. Mastery over the hand promised survival.

Touch to swipe

And yet, the dominant gestures of modern life increasingly ask us to use our hands less. We now live in a state of hyperreality, swiping and tapping. Already, we are seeing the body merge with machines — our phones have become the primary vessel through which we touch the world. Digital comes from digitus, the Latin word for finger. Our newest device morphs with our oldest one.

Sometime ago, in the middle of filling out a document, my friend had leaned over and quietly said, “What the hell happened to your handwriting? I can hardly read it.” I had lanced down to find a trail of unintelligible letters and winced. She meant no harm – she only remembered that, when I was younger, I used to write obsessively by hand, my script shaped by months of steady practice. The comment stung, nevertheless. Had I really fallen out of practice? Could that even happen with writing? A little annoyed, somewhat curious and wildly inflated by grandiose notions of my own skills, I decided to pick up some hand-hobbies in the following days.

​In the weeks that followed, I returned with my tail between my legs — my fingers fumbled with the threads, the slant of the paintbrush faltered, too light in my hand. I could feel the resistance. Was this all I had to show now — the dents in my palm from the weight of a phone, a pinky slightly bent, thumbs trained to be impossibly fast? The thought unsettled me, and I suspect, unsettles many of us.

Return to making

The human hand, in all its glory, taught us to produce, create, gather fragments and make them into a whole. Anyone who has sewn or woven, kneaded dough, drawn, written, or spun the wheel knows this — to create with one’s own hand is a singular experience. This matters more than we admit. After all, isn’t making also a form of thinking? Archaeologist Lambros Malafouris calls this “thinging” — thought that unfolds through contact with the material world. Sketching can help with visualisation and retention, knitting promises immersion, and pottery can teach you orientation. The rhythmic and repetitive movements of crafts are said to sharpen focus and strengthen motor skills. Their sustained practice helps improve sleep, relieve stress and nurture emotional regulation.

Today, we might even call them a medicine for doomscrolling. When the hand works diligently, time slows to the pace reality should be lived in. We are otherwise constantly elbowing through noise. Being humans, we seek tethers which connect us to the outside world. Each stitch, each little marker produces something tangible — a grounding feedback loop.

The hand was always a site of repair and care, but also of craft — in our country, even more, where legacy lives on in a patchwork of weaves and prints. Our ancestors left imprints of their hands on cave walls. Today, in the lines of our palms, we look for promises of what is to come. The hand remains the one thing AI still struggles to generate.

As my generation makes a run or a return to these hobbies, I only hope we can learn to loosen our grip on perfect straight lines and polished images. To create real, tangible things. To make something — anything. Make it good, make it tilted, make it prone to crumbling and unravelling. Forget the prescribed call to touch grass. Touch paper, instead.