From kindergarten to Class 12, I lived and built my life on paper. Every morning i hauled a backpack that was less of a schoolbag but a semi-portable archive of dead trees. Textbooks that had a certain smell when bought. Notebooks with dog-eared pages. The faint stain of ink and highlighters on my fingers.

Hi, I’m Jay.

I take things to 35,000 feet, figuratively and literally. (Or at least I will, as soon as I finish ground school).

I’m a Cadet Pilot, a psychology student, and a writer, which means I have a professional obligation to overthink everything.

That was the rhythm. Heavy bags, ink stained hands, and the tactile friction of knowledge earned on paper. But beneath all, there was a quiet dream growing inside of me. What if it all could be different? What if every textbook, notebook and worksheet could live inside one sleek pad? No weight, no clutter. Just pure portable knowledge.

In mid-2022. I saved some money.

It arrived in a pristine white box. An iPad Pro with pencil, tastefully engraved with my name like it was made for me along with the best alternative for the Ipad magic keyboard ( ESR rebound magnetic keyboard case). After setting it up, the first thing i installed after Spotify was Goodnotes (shoutout to Goodnotes ). It felt like stepping into the future. Dream coming true. No more overflowing shelves. I imagined myself as one of those hyper organized students I saw on YouTube, every note tagged, every textbook searchable, every scribble backed up forever.

But then reality hit.

The price shock. Over a $1,100 for the iPad and the pencil, another $20 for Goodnotes, and the creeping realization that I had just signed up for a completely new way of working. It wasn’t just an upgrade, it was a mountain-sized learning curve. I was literally relearning how to write.

And the feel? God, the feel. Writing with the Apple Pencil on bare glass was sterile, like skating on ice. There was no feedback, no resistance, none of that comforting scratch my brain had spent years wired to. I tried the matte screen protector “fix” but it felt like a trade-off with the devil. The writing was slightly better, but my beautiful high resolution display was now dulled and grainy. The iPad was supposed to feel futuristic, but it was already a compromise.

Then came the comparison game. I made the mistake of opening YouTube and Pinterest. Suddenly, I was drowning in “study inspo” perfect pastel highlights, immaculate margins and calligraphy level handwriting. My messy scrawls, functional but chaotic, looked like failures in comparison. I wasn’t just studying anymore. I was measuring myself against a fictional aesthetic. My iPad, meant to free me, had somehow trapped me in an inferiority complex.

This was my first brush with what psychologist call the metacognitive illusion: the dangerous feeling that neatness equals mastery. A digital page that looks beautiful feels like knowledge is sticking, when in reality it isn’t.

But here’s the paradox. As I moved into my professional aviation training, I couldn’t just ditch the iPad. It was genuinely powerful. My textbooks were searchable. My notes were instantly

organized. My handwriting was converted into typed text with a tap. Everything synced across devices. It was the most advanced, practical, organized study tool I’d ever used.

And yet… it never felt real.

With paper, there’s an honesty to the experience. The smell of ink, the weight of page. The little mental map in your brain finding where you wrote what, “the diagram was in the top-left corner of the page with a coffee stain.” That’s encoding specificity at work, which is how physical context anchors memory. On paper, you know where things live. On the iPad, everything floats in an endless scroll of sameness.

There’s the effort. With books, studying feels like an act. You buy 3 types of pens, rulers, 10 colors of highlighters. You underline by hand. Furthermore, you scribble margin notes. You invest sweat equity into the page. That effort becomes part of the knowledge itself, what psychologists call effort justification. It’s the **IKEA effect applied to learning: the harder you work on the thing, the more it becomes yours. **

With the iPad, ironically, effort disappears. You have millions of pen styles, colors, and thicknesses, but none of them feel earned. They’re just pixels. No matter how many hours you pour in, the notes never feel like objects in the world. They feel like files. Disposable. Empty.

The iPad was everything I thought I wanted: portability, convenience, organization. But it was missing the one thing I didn’t realize I needed. Soul.

The Cognitive Nosedive

When I began my pilot training, I made a decision that the iPad would be my one and only study companion. It made sense. Aviation is already digital. Cockpits run on screens, not paper. Why shouldn’t my study system match the future I was flying toward?

At first, it felt promising. My notes were tidy, searchable, always backed up. No more flipping through fat textbooks looking for a buried diagram. I could carry entire libraries on one slab of glass. In a way, it was intoxicating. I felt efficient, modern, ahead of the curve.

But then came the Technical General exam.

If you’ve never been through it, let me explain. This isn’t like a high school math test where you can scrape by with “kind of knowing.” This is one of the unforgiving gatekeeper exams of aviation. A mountain of dense, merciless theory. Aerodynamics, engines, electrical systems, all crammed into thousands of pages. And in aviation, almost knowing is the same as not knowing. You can’t “guess” how an aircraft system works at 35,000 feet.

And here’s the terrifying part: the knowledge wasn’t sticking.

On the iPad, everything felt neat, but hollow. I could read for hours, scroll through PDFs, highlight in neon colors… and yet, the next morning, it was as if I’d done nothing. The learning slid off my brain like water on glass.

It was the strangest, most unsettling feeling. I wasn’t failing because I was lazy. I was failing because the very tool I had trusted was betraying me.

I was heading toward what I now call a cognitive nosedive: all systems looking functional, but the aircraft (my brain) losing altitude fast.

That’s when I snapped.

I did something absurd.

I took my thousand-page PDFs, walked into a print shop, and said: “Print it all.”

The Homecoming

The printer groaned and clattered, spitting out stack after stack of warm A4 paper. The shopkeeper looked at me like I was insane. Honestly? I felt insane.. Here I was, the proud owner of a futuristic $1000 iPad, paying extra money to drag myself backwards into the past.

But then I picked up the first heavy stack. I opened the first page. I pulled out a simple ballpoint pen. And I underlined.

And in that moment, It felt like home.

God, the missed feeling of pen on paper.

The scratch of ink. The roughness of the page. The effort of underlining, circling and margin-noting. Suddenly, my brain lit up. The information wasn’t floating away anymore. It had weight. A presence in the world.

Even the imperfections were beautiful. A smudged word. A dog-eared corner. A hastily drawn arrow. These weren’t flaws; they were memory anchors. I could suddenly remember that the diagram I needed was “top-left, three pages after the engine cooling section.” For me, it was the difference between “knowing about something” and owning it.

And here’s the irony printing those pages actually made the knowledge feel more valuable. Because I’d paid for the paper. I put in the effort with my pen and I invested in the tools. Pens, rulers, highlighters. That labor translated into ownership.

With the iPad, I had millions of colors, pens, and thickness options… yet nothing felt “real.” With paper, even a blue Bic pen felt like a weapon.

The iPad was efficient. Paper was alive.

The Distraction Engine

There was another problem with the iPad that I hadn’t admitted to even myself until then. It is a distraction machine disguised as a tool. To quote the old adage, it is a jack of all trades and a master of none.

The iPad’s greatest strength, that it can do everything, is also its fatal flaw.

You sit down to study . You open your notes. You highlight a paragraph. Then a mail pops up on your face like it’s the nuclear launch codes. Next thing you know, you’re on Youtube three videos deep into aviation crashes or productivity hacks. By the time you crawl back to your notes, your brain is still buzzing with residue from the last distraction.

This isn’t just bad discipline. It’s how the brain works. Psychologists call it attention residue that lingers as cognitive noise from the last task. Even if you switch back to studying, part of your focus is still stuck on that video you watched. Combine this with cognitive load theory, the fact that our working memory is limited, and you have a perfect recipe for fractured focus.

And fractured focus has no place in a flight deck.

Paper doesn’t have notifications. A book doesn’t care about Wi-Fi. Ink doesn’t buzz. Sometimes, “less capable” is exactly what you need.

But I can’t ignore the reality: paper isn’t perfect, either. The duality!

The Uncomfortable Truth

I passed my exam, but at a cost. I’m back to hauling a portable archive of dead trees, my shoulders aching like I’m back in Class 12. It’s chaotic and risky. There is no search bar, I’m back to flipping through hundreds of pages to find one specific diagram. And there is no backup. One spilled coffee, one lost bag, and my work is gone forever. No iCloud. No undo. Just gone.

The iPad failed me because it was too capable, too frictionless, and distracting. Paper succeeded because it was limited forcing me to engage deeply. Yet those very limitations are exhausting.

I can’t help wondering: Is there something in between?

Does a tool exist that combines paper’s cognitive power the friction, the focus, the encoding specificity with digital’s convenience? Something that feels real to write on but doesn’t weigh down my bag? A device that protects my focus rather than fracturing it?

There is something in between but the line is blurry. E ink tablets could be the savior and the best of both worlds. The convenience of iPad and the friction that mimics pen and paper

But do they actually work? Or are they just expensive toys that do two things poorly instead of one thing well

The test

I have decided to take the leap.

I am getting an e-ink tablet for my upcoming ground classes at the Air India Academy. I am attempting to replace the kilogram-heavy stacks of manuals and charts with one single slate.

Will it save my back without sacrificing my brain? Can a digital tool actually support the “unlearning” process?

I am betting my ground school performance on a piece of niche tech.

Will the lack of distractions give me an edge? Or will the inability to physically flip pages destroy my “mental maps”?

I am honestly 50/50 on whether this will work.

I’ll be reporting back with the unvarnished truth, glitches, triumphs, and all.