An essay on value, purpose, quality and constraints on watch enthusiasm.
If you’ve ever taken Econ 101 you’re familiar with the production possibility frontier, i.e. “Guns and Butter.” Remember? If you’re not remembering, don’t worry it’s not ground-breaking, and it’s the same principle behind a budget constraint curve. I can have 2 ten dollar ice creams, 4 five dollar cokes, or some combination thereof, say one 1 ice cream and 2 cokes.
What does that have to do with watch enthusiasm? As it turns out, everything.
As enthusiasts, NOT collectors, we are constrained in essentially two major ways: a “wearing possibility frontier” (I can wear however many watches I want in a given time period, however the time I get to spend with each individual watch decreases to more I wear others) and a “budget constraint” (I can have two Omega or a drawerful of Steinhart and Citizens, or one Omega and half drawerful of the others, or a Rolex an Omega and an irate wife.) In other words, we choose to wear a watch at a certain time, for a “purpose” and we choose which and how many watches we will purchase to suit those purposes based on a budget.
Such constraints force us to make “value” choices on what we buy, wear and inevitably decide to keep or sell. Many of us create other artificial constraints, for example, I will fill this watch box and then I have to sell to buy another, one in one out, or some such system. Perhaps it’s a rule based on which of each “type” (usually for a certain purpose, like exploring!) and so on. Much like the artificial constraints erected by alcoholics who will “only drink beer” or “only drink on weekends,” these purchase constraints never work long term. We eventually think up new purposes for our watches, and thus we need to buy more to fill those newly minted mental niches.
If you’re inclined here to say, “well Mr. Buddha, I can have watches because I like to collect them.” It’s true, you “can” have watches for that reason. But if you have them for that reason, that’s not watch enthusiast behavior, that’s something I like to call watch entomology. Many of us have an additional “collection” part to our hobby as well. However, this essay focuses on the true degenerate side of our hobby, those watches which we pretend to be tools of either the trade or of high fashion. Or perhaps we fancy them to fill both roles.
From a lens of function, our myriad “value” judgments for these watches arise, all based on a supposed “purpose.” And it is at this juncture where we begin to think about “quantity vs. quality” isn’t it? How, as enthusiasts, do we define quality? Specs? Finish? Design? Price comparisons? The ability to hold value? Functions? Materials? History? Round and round we go. More watches, or fewer “quality” watches? Why is a Rolex better than a Casio Royale? Is it? It’s certainly more expensive. But it wasn’t always so, there was a time when the Seiko equivalent was indeed more pricey than a Rolex. After all, the Casio has far more functions than any Rolex, and is more accurate than any Rolex (save the Oysterquartz). So what gives?
I had been struggling with this as an enthusiast and writer alike, for the better part of two months now. I had come upon a rather silly conclusion. For mechanical or automatic watches, you only needed a couple of the highest mechanical marvels and finish as you could comfortably afford, and after that, fill the box with “fun” quartz pieces with all the good functions you could want, as the “tool.” For a month I wore my modern Globemaster as a daily wear “high quality” piece, and if I were to work out, or need a “tool” I would reach into my ever growing collection of “fun quartz pieces.” Quantity AND Quality. I had solved the riddle, and was thus the most well-reasoned of all collectors. Fan mail can be sent to my instagram handle.
Then I realized it was all hogwash. The “quality” that we search for is finding a moment of happiness from the thing we put on our wrist. It’s all subjective. Every last bit of it. Isn’t it about fun, after all? Not endless one-upsmanship as to who knows better the definition of value, who can spit out specs, who can flex the most Pateks on instagram or any plethora of proxy-war to decide who has the biggest horological dong.
With that in mind, I went to my watch box, and pulled out a long forgotten piece, my first “Swiss automatic” (such good specs) and I remembered the “why.” I didn’t know much about watches at the time. I just thought it was cool, I had a big life milestone, I had been saving up, and I liked it. So I bought it. It sparked Joy, to borrow a phrase.
I didn’t know the specs. I didn’t even really know the difference between mineral or sapphire at the time, what an ETA or a Miyota was, or what the difference between Chronometer and Chronograph was. I just knew it made me smile, so I bought it.
It was a MeisterSinger Metris, possibly the most confusing conglomerate of specs in one watch that somehow has coherence. A sport watch with odd lugs, a screw down crown with 200m water resistance, outfitted with a single, unlumed hand, a red magnified date at 6 o’clock, and perhaps the most poorly lumed hour markers I have ever seen. It came on a denim strap.
What the hell is the purpose of this damned watch?
I knew then as a novice enthusiast better than I do now as a “seasoned collector.” Its purpose was to bring me a little joy, “to be fucking cool,” as Kaz from the Two Broke Watch Snobs, might say. And you know, because it had that quality, it delivered on value. And with that, I have no need to quantity just how many Casios and Steinharts I could have had instead. I can just sit here, and enjoy it. And that’s all any of us really want out of this hobby right? Hell maybe that’s all we want to squeeze out of life, a little joy.
