The true watch obsessive learns, sooner or later, that giving a watch away hurts far less than selling one—especially when the sale takes place on eBay, under fluorescent lighting, at the mercy of low-ball bidders with no evident shame. Money changes hands, but dignity does not.
When a watch is given to a friend, there is grief, yes, but it is clean grief. The obsessive knows where the watch has gone. It has not disappeared into the void. It has been adopted. The new owner will wind it, strap it on, and—most importantly—understand it. The watch now lives in a reliable home. The separation has narrative continuity.
Selling a watch to a stranger is something else entirely. The watch vanishes into anonymity, shipped off like a misfit toy condemned to an unloving Christmas morning. One imagines it being worn carelessly, scratched against countertops, left overnight in damp gym lockers, its history erased by someone who never asked to hear it. Worse still is the insult of the low bid, as if the watch’s years of loyal service have been publicly appraised and found wanting.
This is why giving a watch away produces a strange, paradoxical pleasure. It feels like an act of stewardship rather than loss. Selling, by contrast, curdles the stomach. It tastes like bile. The obsessive may need the money, but the transaction leaves a moral residue that no PayPal balance can cleanse.
This condition is known as Custodial Consolation: the relief that comes not from letting go, but from knowing exactly where the thing has gone. The obsessive is comforted by certainty. The watch is not lost—it is merely relocated, where it will be understood, protected, and occasionally admired, which is all it ever really wanted.
Cinemorphosis 
Leave a comment