I recently wrote an essay arguing that pursuing mechanical watches in a digital world is a kind of elegant absurdity—an expensive devotion to obsolete technology while the rest of civilization marches toward sensors, satellites, and software. My proposed remedy was simple and slightly heretical: sell the mechanicals and replace them with an atomic or Bluetooth G-Shock. Accuracy, durability, zero drama. Efficiency instead of romance. Sanity instead of ritual.
The piece was meant to provoke. Not just readers—me. Writing, after all, is less self-expression than self-interrogation. As Kafka put it, it’s the axe for the frozen sea. Sometimes the ice you crack belongs to your own illusions.
What began as a tongue-in-cheek thought experiment turned into something less comfortable. It forced me to examine the possibility that my love for mechanical watches isn’t love at all—it’s theology.
Over the years I refined my taste, sold the excess, and curated a tight collection of mechanical divers. Vintage aesthetic. Tool-watch credibility. A faint whiff of James Bond climbing out of the ocean with a harpoon gun and moral certainty. I told myself this evolution reflected discernment, maturity, identity.
But the thought experiment raised a harder question: Did I discover my taste—or manufacture it?
Human beings have a habit of building sacred spaces inside a profane world. Perhaps my watches became sacred cows—objects elevated not because they were necessary, but because I needed something to stand against modern life. Mechanical time as resistance. Analog as virtue. Nostalgia as courage.
In this story, I cast myself as a quiet rebel.
But what if the story is fiction?
What if I’m not resisting anything at all? What if I’ve simply joined a small tribe of aging enthusiasts who reassure each other that spending thousands on obsolete machines is an act of character rather than consumerism?
At that point, the romance starts to look like cosplay.
Thousands spent on purchase. Thousands more on service. All to reenact a cinematic memory of youth. The whole enterprise begins to resemble those baseball fantasy camps where middle-aged men pay to take batting practice with retired heroes and pretend, for a weekend, that the dream never ended.
The thought experiment did something dangerous: it planted a fantasy.
Sell everything.
Replace the collection with one or two G-Shocks.
Start over.
The appeal isn’t the watch. It’s the psychological reset. The possibility of closing a chapter and reclaiming the mental bandwidth the hobby quietly occupies. Change, after all, is the most intoxicating drug available to a restless mind.
I’ve felt this kind of impulse before.
In 2005, after three decades of gym culture, I was standing in an LA Fitness in Torrance, wiping someone else’s sweat off a treadmill while pop music pounded overhead and everyone talked about nothing. The thought hit me with sudden clarity: I need to get out of here.
Within a week I’d left the gym, bought kettlebells, started power yoga in my garage, and never went back. At the time it felt impulsive. In hindsight, it was alignment—something deep finally overriding inertia.
I sometimes wonder if watch collectors experience the same internal shift—the moment when accumulation feels less like passion and more like weight. The urge to take a wrecking ball to the collection. To simplify. To breathe.
This moment has a name: Horological Deconversion—the quiet psychological turn when watches stop looking like identity and start looking like artifacts of habit, mythology, and sunk cost.
I know someone who went through it. A serious collector. Deeply invested. One day he had the overwhelming urge to sell everything and replace the collection with a $20 Casio F-91W. Eventually he did. He told me the move saved his sanity.
He still reads the forums. Still watches the madness unfold. But now he’s an observer, not a participant. The zoo is still interesting when you’re no longer inside the cage.
Anyone who sells their mechanical collection, buys a single indestructible digital, and walks away lighter will have my respect. Not because minimalism is virtuous, but because exits are hard. Leaving a closed system always is.
There’s something quietly heroic about it—the horological version of a Shawshank escape. Crawl through the tunnel. Emerge on the other side. Stand in the rain and realize the prison was partly self-built.
And somewhere beyond the walls, there’s a small, durable watch keeping perfect time—and a life of freedom and expanding possibilities.
Cinemorphosis 
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