So I bought a luxury watch š³š§
Meditations on self-expression and conspicuous consumption at age 40
Iāve only owned two watches in my life, as far as I can remember. The first was a Goofy watch that I got when my grandfather took the whole family to Disney World in 1995; I liked it because the hours were numbered counter-clockwise and the watch ran backwards. I might have worn it for a year before I lost it somewhere. The second was a Swatch that I bought on a school trip to Italy with my Latin class in 2000. If memory serves, I paid 150,000 lire for it (about $75 US). I have no idea why I bought a Swiss watch in Italy. I wore it for a couple years, I think - I have no idea what happened to it.
And up until last weekend, that was it. Iāve never really been a watch guy, neither in the bygone analog era (once upon a time it was, in fact, possible not to know the time) nor the current cloud-synced digital one. And yet, a few days ago, I bought a luxury mechanical watch, brand new, from a boutique here in Hong Kong. This was not an impulse purchase, but the culmination of several months of rumination, introspection, education, and of course rationalization. Iāve probably thought about it a little too much, and now Iām going to write about it a lot too much.
My girlfriend and I were in the UAE over lunar new year. We did the obligatory dune-bashing and gawked at the Burj and went to Ferrari World, but we also visited several of her friends and former colleagues who now live there, one of whom had invited us to her wedding this summer. One of the main purposes of the trip, it must be said, was to meet her fiancĆ©. I got to know him one evening while the womenfolk were scoping out wedding dresses with the bride-to-be. We were supposed to meet up for a drink and then join the ladies for dinner. What actually happened was it began pouring rain (in the desert, I know) shortly before we met, making it impractical to leave the bar - Dubai handles rain about as well as the southern US handles snow - so instead of one drink before dinner we had seven Negroni instead of dinner. Much of the evening is a gin-infused blur, but at some point we talked about the fancy watch he was wearing - an Omega Speedmaster, the āMoonwatchā.
I think it was this connection to the moon that held my attention beyond the inevitable and severe hangover the following day, for the Speedmaster doesnāt speak to me in its aesthetics. The history, though, is genuinely interesting. Although the chronograph was originally designed for pilots, submariners, and racing drivers, the Speedmaster was chosen (over models from Longines and Rolex) by NASA for use by its astronauts, beginning with the Gemini 3 mission in 1965 and continuing through the Apollo program and Space Shuttle era. The Speedmaster was the first watch worn on a space walk (Ed White, Gemini 4) and the first on the moon (Aldrin, actually - Armstrong left his in the lunar module). Itās the watch Jack Swigert used to time the 14-second burn to get the Apollo 13 crew back to Earth. As an American, I consider this stuff to be a part of my shared cultural heritage, and it appeals to me in some ineffable, quasi-quixotic way.
I didnāt ask him what he paid for it, mostly because I barely knew the man at this point, but also because we donāt share a culture (heās French), and I felt like a bit of a rube for not having the slightest clue what an Omega Speedmaster costs. (A thousand bucks? Five thousand?? Twenty???) When I regained consciousness the next day I looked it up - around six grand. Heās a personal wealth manager and drives an AMG Mercedes, so that wasnāt too shocking.
The idea of spending six thousand dollars on a watch, though, even one that was good enough for Neil Fucking Armstrong, was insane to me. A comprehensively unimaginable non-starter.
But!
Those marketing geniuses at the Swatch Group (the umbrella company that owns both Omega and Swatch) had recently conspired to bring the astronomical bona fides of the Speedmaster to the terra firma price point of the Swatch with the aptly named MoonSwatch. āPerfect!ā I thought. āI can pay homage to the heroes of space travel who came before me and not spend six thousand dollars!ā There were two problems with this, one of which was fatal: these watches havenāt been easy to find anywhere since they were launched, even in Hong Kong, where we generally have everything. (The other problem was that I watched a few reviews on YouTube, and everyone seemed to be underwhelmed given the price - $260 for a plasticky, quartz-powered Swatch.) By now, though, I was invested enough in the idea of securing a little piece of history for myself that walking away empty-handed from this unplanned fit of consumerism proved difficult.
Right. Back to Omega, then.
I was more in love with the idea of the Speedmaster at this point than the watch itself, especially on a steel-link bracelet - too redolent of old men for my tastes. Perfect for the Mercedes-driving, money-managing Frenchman, but Iām a Latin teacher. I persisted in window shopping on the website, exploring all the various collections and models (Omega makes a lot of watches). Found a few that I thought looked pretty good. Even found a Speedmaster that Iād love to own - the Moonphase (and the unobtainable Snoopy model, Iāll admit it). And then I saw it, about halfway down the page of Seamaster models - the Aqua Terra 150M Co-Axial Master Chronometer GMT Worldtimer 43MM, ref. 220.12.43.22.03.001. (Luxury watch companies arenāt great with names.)
I will say without hyperbole that I became obsessed with this watch within moments of discovering it. The more I looked at it, learned about it, read and watched reviews of it, the more I wanted it. Just look at it.
This was unfortunate. Never you mind the Frenchmanās six thousand dollar Moonwatch; this stately Worldtimer is just north of n i n e t h o u s a n d d o l l a r s. (And this steel model in blue, my obsession, is the most affordable version of this watch. You can have it in a titanium case for twelve thousand, or 18K gold for forty seven thousand.) Again, I dismissed the idea of spending that kind of money on something so utterly frivolous (it is frivolous) as manifest lunacy. But I didnāt stop thinking about it. I would joke to my (very supportive, very understanding, very wonderful) girlfriend about how I was going to spend nine thousand actual dollars on a wristwatch, ha-ha-ha. Over time, apparently, it became less and less of a joke. I donāt know when my subconscious mind decided I was really going to buy this watch, but I suspect it was several months earlier than my rational brain did.
Actually, I think the matter writ large is best understood through Jonathan Haidtās metaphor of the Elephant and Rider in human behavior. As he writes in The Happiness Hypothesis:
"Perched atop the Elephant, the Rider holds the reins and seems to be the leader. But the Riderās control is precarious because the Rider is so small relative to the Elephant. Anytime the six-ton Elephant and the Rider disagree about which direction to go, the Rider is going to lose. Heās completely overmatched."
I tend to think of myself, naĆÆvely, as having more like a two-ton Elephant and a particularly deft Rider. And yet, even though I know that buying this watch was wholly Elephant-brained, Iāve not stopped thinking of the failure of the Rider to do his job. I mean, this assemblage of cogs, gears, and steel is now the most valuable thing that I own, and by some margin. I say this as someone who has two rather expensive hobbies and isnāt afraid to spend money to have nice things. Still, Iāve never been tempted to spend nine thousand dollars on a bass guitar, or on a camera body or lens, and those are things that Iād have a much more practical use for! The mind-bogglage persists.
Human beings, though, are nothing if not rationalization machines. My theory is that the Elephant and the Rider were in cahoots. It was a conspiracy! Thatās the only explanation that plausibly results in me walking around with nine thousand dollarsā worth of precision Swiss engineering on my wrist. I know the Elephantās motivations, for they are as transparent as they are predictable (want shiny new object). The Rider, thoughā¦ how was he disarmed? It was, I think, some incalculable admixture of the following mitigating factors:
I could afford it. The biggest and earliest hurdle was the sticker shock. Everyone will have a different way of crunching the numbers to decide if something is affordable, but I can say that I had the money sitting in my checking account, and having that money reconstituted in the form of a depreciating asset (this particular watch is not at all likely to increase in value) has not appreciably altered my overall financial situation. There are certainly more responsible things I could do with nine thousand dollars, but Iām already doing those things with other money and in larger sums. This was not a financially self-destructive act.
Itās an analog nostalgia thing. There is (nearly) no practical reason for anyone to wear a mechanical wristwatch annÅ dominÄ« MMXXIII. This Worldtimer, like many of Omegaās watches, is a METAS-certified master chronometer, which just means that itās about as accurate as any mechanical watch can currently be, and still, it can retain that certification and be off by up to 5 seconds per day. A $20 plastic watch with a quartz movement will keep more accurate time, and any internet-connected device that can sync regularly with a server will be better still. A mechanical watch, now, is a vinyl record, itās film photography - a technologically inferior product that offers an alternative user experience that is highly desirable to some people. I am absolutely one of those people. I own dozens of vinyl records, two film cameras, and now a mechanical watch. These old technologies are just so much more tangible, relatable, comprehensible. When I play a vinyl record, I see the rotation of the platter, the undulations of the needle on the recordās surface. When I look at the open caseback of this watch, I see the oscillation of the mainspring that powers the movement. When I hold the watch to my ear, I hear it ticking away. My cellphone, by contrast, is a cold, silent slab, the inner workings of which I cannot see and couldnāt possibly understand. Maybe this is just one of those things that happens when you get older, but Iām comforted by the humanity of the old analog world. Ah, on that pointā¦
I turned 40 this year. Maybe Iāve actually had a mid-life crisis, and this is my Corvette. (In which case Iām several tens of thousands of dollars under budget - maybe I do need a Moonwatch...) 40 didnāt hit me particularly hard, because the oft-spouted platitude that āage is just a numberā is true. The fact that we happen to count in base-10 is arbitrary, and by extension so is anything thusly reckoned. But when I tell people that I bought myself a watch because I turned 40, that seems to resonate. So yeah, umā¦ thatās why I did it.
I am fancy-people adjacent. When I got a job at a prestigious international school last year, I came into contact with fairly well-off people for the first time in my professional life. We are well-remunerated (by teacher standards, anyway), our studentsā parents quite a bit more so. I have a colleague who has a Rolex, another a Grand Seiko. We all holiday in Europe (sometimes multiple times a year) and go to boozy brunches at swanky restaurants on Saturdays. I am an interloper among such people - I had to buy a new wardrobe for this job, and in doing so I grabbed things off the rack that more-or-less fit and that I could get away with wearing several times in a row without ironing. (Iād be happy never to iron a shirt again in my life.) If I wonāt spring for the tailored Armani suit, at least I can flash an Omega to signal my belonging to the upwardly-mobile class.
Have Worldtimer, will travel. Even though Iāve watched like eleventy billion hours of YouTube content about mechanical watches in the past few months and could probably work for Omega as a sales representative at this point, Iām not itching to acquire a second watch now that I have this one. It really was all about this watch for me, in part because itās a worldtimer. If youāre unfamiliar, worldtimer watches are like GMT watches (which have an extra hand that will keep track of time in a second time zone) on steroids, in that you can tell the time across the entire world at a glance. On the Omega specifically, you set the hands to local time wherever you are, while the light/dark blue 24-hour rotating ring provides the GMT function - in my case, always indicating the time in Hong Kong. Then you just look around the dial of the watch to see the time everywhere else, with each time zone represented by a notable location within it. (Iāve only yet been to eight of them - Sydney, Tokyo, Bangkok, Dubai, London, Puerto Rico, New York, and Chicago.) Just glancing at the watch now, for example, I can see that itās 6:55 PM here in Hong Kong, 8:55 AM in Rio, 6:55 AM in Chicago, 11:55 PM in Auckland, et cetera. Every glance at the dial reminds me that thereās a big world outside of Hong Kong, full of different places and people. I have friends in many of those other places; a simple act of checking the time now makes me think of them. Itās a perfect watch for me.
Well, not quite. At 43mm lug-to-lug (as they say in the industry), itās probably a little bit too big for my scrawny wrists. Itās also pretty heavy. And over 14mm thick. Oh, and it cost nine thousand dollars.
I absolutely adore it anyway.
