I Guess I'm a Watch Guy Now

Hamilton Khaki Field Watch

I’m talking about watches because I want to. I’m going to walk through the watches I remember having and why I have fallen back in love with watches.

MY HISTORY WITH WATCHES

When i was a kid the only watch I remember having was a Shark, which is a watch specifically made for surfing, diving, and swimming. I stopped caring about watches for a long while, but when I was in college I was turned into that weirdo who was wearing a golden Casio calculator watch. How quirky, eh?

Then I wore a fitbit for a while but I wasn’t fit so they made me throw the watch in the trash. Following this I was sent a Seiko automatic watch by my father (SNK805). I wore this for about a year and a half until I went all in on the Apple watch for 3 years. It was so convenient to have perfect time, controls over music and podcasts, and the ability to ping my phone when I lost it. However, you had to charge it every night (and sometimes it wouldn’t sit right on the charger and you’d be without a watch the next day), but more importantly it tracked EVERYTHING about.

At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, I saw a bunch of announcements that Apple was going to begin rolling out contact tracing and my paranoid brain started screaming. I took off the Apple watch in March and haven’t looked back since. I put on the old Seiko I had, and then somehow YouTube knew I had gone back to mechanical watches and they started recommending me a whole bunch of watch content and it really brought this love of mechanical watches out of me.

WHY I LOVE WATCHES?

In 2020, everything is digital, everything is connected, everything needs to be charged, and everything tracks you. Simply put, I love the idea of having one last piece of technology that does not require firmware updates, does not track you 24 hours a day, doesn’t push notifications to you all day, doesn’t keep you available for contact whenever someone wants, and something that WILL work as long as I spend 15 seconds winding it (or moving my wrist).

For some reason, no matter how stressed I get at work, or how deep into an excel spreadsheet I get, taking a few seconds to look at the watch it gives me a little bit of a reminder that nothing really matters and we’re all going to die anyways.that was a joke…kind of. It really does ground me and reminds me to slow down.

That’s the blog post. I wouldn’t be surprised if I make a video about some clocks or watches or something in the future.