Beware of The Grim Reaper Watch

The New York Times article, titled “Skimpy Men’s Swimming Briefs Are Making a Splash,” offers a solemn dispatch from the front lines of GLP-1 drugs, but I would guess that men—having exhausted every form of visible self-optimization—are now expressing their Ozempic-enabled slenderness via tiny, Lycra-clad declarations of status. We’re talking male bikinis, or what I like to call the ego sling.

Apparently, if you’re dropping $18,000 a year to chemically suppress your appetite and shed your humanity one subcutaneous injection at a time, you deserve the privilege of looking like a Bond villain’s pool boy. I suppose this is the endgame: pay to waste away, then wrap what’s left in a luxury logoed banana peel.

Luxury underwear companies, never ones to miss a chance to monetize body dysmorphia, are now marketing these second-skin briefs not as mere swimwear, but as power statements. To wear them is to say: “I’ve defeated fat, joy, modesty, and comfort in one fell swoop.”

I’m almost 64. My aspirations remain high—ideally, I’d like to look like a special-ops operator on vacation in Sardinia. But I know my place. I wear boxer-style swim trunks, the cloth of the pragmatic and the semi-dignified. They’re not exciting, but neither is seeing a sun-leathered septuagenarian adjust a spandex slingshot over a suspicious tan line.

There’s a difference between being aspirational and being delusional. The former means striving for vitality, strength, and energy. The latter means stuffing yourself into a satirical undergarment and pretending you’re a twenty-two-year-old wide receiver with a sponsorship deal.

To my fellow older men: sculpt your body like it’s your spiritual obligation—but when it comes to swim briefs the size of a hotel mint, maybe opt out. Not every part of youth is worth reliving. 

When I think of old guys clinging to their youth by wearing undersized swim trunks, I often think back to the summer of 2019 when my wife and twin daughters were in Maui and I was treated to one of life’s great grotesques: a compact man in his mid-seventies parading the beach in dark-blue Speedos with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. She was Mediterranean gorgeous, twenty-something, and clearly imported as the ultimate accessory. He was trim, shaved, strutting across the sand like a hedge-fund satyr who believed that constant motion kept the Grim Reaper wheezing in his wake. He dove into the surf not like a man swimming, but like a man negotiating—bargaining with Time.

You could smell his wealth before you could smell the salt air. A CEO, no doubt—half his life in boardrooms, the other half clawing at immortality. His creed was Hefner’s: work hard, play harder, and Botox anything that betrays the passage of time. I’m not here to moralize about his May-December arrangement. What fascinated me was the fantasy: money, discipline, and a bit of manscaping as talismans against entropy, as if youth could be distilled into a cologne.

But the tableau reeked of mismatch—two puzzle pieces jammed together with superglue. Forced smiles, awkward touches: every moment chipped another sliver from the illusion until they looked less like lovers and more like hostages. This was not youth preserved; this was youth taxidermied. His confidence read as terror. His curated life, meant to inspire envy, collapsed into a sad performance—a tuxedo on a traffic cone.

This kind of mismatch exists for the man who tries to force an oversized, loud watch that he could have worn with pride in his youth, but now looks like a desperate attempt to hold on to something that is long gone. His intent in wearing such an ostentatious watch is to curate a life of youth and virility, but the opposite occurs: The inappropriate piece of gauche jewelry reminds the world that this man is close to death and therefore this shiny monstrosity on his wrist is The Grim Reaper Watch: the oversized, hyper-loud timepiece worn not to express taste or confidence, but to wage a visible, losing war against aging—a last-ditch signal of youth, virility, and relevance that lands with the opposite effect, announcing not vitality but panic. Like the seventy-year-old in neon swim briefs or the hedge-fund satyr sprinting through Maui as if motion alone could outrun mortality, the wearer treats titanium, ceramic, or fluorescent rubber as a talisman against entropy. But the mismatch gives the game away. Instead of projecting power, the watch reads as youth taxidermy—a glittering performance of denial that makes Time, the very thing the watch measures, feel suddenly louder. The Grim Reaper Watch does not stop the clock; it amplifies it, ticking on the wrist like a tiny, expensive memento mori.