Best Pens for 2024: Gel, Ballpoint, Rollerball, and Fountain Pens

Fountain pens that work well without fuss, like Lamy Safari, or Pilot Metropolitan, really are nicer to use than ballpoint or gel pens, and the slight extra effort to using ink in cartridges or from a bottle adds familiarity and comfort to it. It’s not a pen, it’s your pen, and the longer you have it, the more attached you are to it. The more attached you are to it, the better the act of using it feels. It makes your world feel less disposable.

1. Status symbols are frequently every-day objects elevated in some way. Montblanc pens were good status symbols to have on your desk when everyone used pens all the time, now they're anachronistic. So the upper end of the market shrinks as the item becomes less necessary.

2. Pens becoming less necessary for daily life makes them more of a hobby, and while people pretty much by definition are spending disposable income on a hobby they probably still have a budget in mind. Also, a lot of hobbies get kind of fuzzy between the hobby itself and collecting-as-a-hobby (is the hobby writing or is the hobby collecting pens?). A lot of people would rather own a small collection of affordable "pretty good" fountain pens with some differences between them instead of one really excellent pen.

3. The usual march of progress means a very good fountain pen can be manufactured for a lot less money than it could a few decades ago. That means businesses can serve that hobbyist market, and satisfy the craving for variety.

Same process that happens with lots of goods. Watches of any description used to be a luxury good, then cheap quartz movements were invented: the luxury market for Rolexes never went away, but a lot more people bought Timexes, and nobody really needs a watch anymore because we have cell phones, but there's still a hobbyist market. Nobody needs a turntable to play LPs anymore, but vinyl is a big hobby for probably a lot of the same nostalgia/"physical is good" reasons pens are a hobby, and you can get a very good sounding turntable today for a lot less money than you could 40 years ago.

I ordered them on a whim but will likely never use another pen for note taking again. The feel of writing is much better than any Pilot or Pentel I've used.

Ignore the haters who claim pigmented ink wrecks your pens--both my wife and I have drawn miles of lines with it, and even leaving it sitting on the desk unused for weeks, we never have a problem with it.