Why You Should Wear a Watch
A normal watch is a temporal stick-shift.
Full disclosure: I make watches for fun, but my feelings about wearing watches hasn’t changed since long before I started tinkering with them. There are plenty of reasons to wear an old-fashioned, non-smartwatch. Of course, if you’re reading this, you may be thinking of reasons regular watches are stupid. And you know what? I can’t argue with you on that score. You’re not all wrong.
People wear wristwatches because they supply us with convenience. They do something useful for us. Smartwatches do plenty of useful things, but the relationship between one’s worn accessories and oneself is not like between one’s phone and oneself; a phone can be put down and ignored or even turned off, but a wristwatch is supposed to live on your wrist all your waking hours. The wristwatch grew out of specific needs. Our relationship with it, and with time, reflects that history.
Past Is Prologue
First, some history. We may think of wristwatches as archaic, but they are actually a fairly new invention. Sure, clocks and pocket watches have been around for a long time, but the wristwatch didn’t become popular until after the pilot’s watch came into being in the first half of the 20th century. They didn’t start to appear on the wrists of the very cool until later…
