As I close in on sixty-five and retirement in eight months, I hunger for life changes. A new chapter makes life feel longer. It’s like adding a second story to your house. You get the permits, hire the contractors, endure six months of dust, and your single-story shack becomes a glorious two-story home. Surely you will live longer now.
A lot of these life changes are fantasies. I find myself looking at real estate. With my suburban Los Angeles home approaching two million dollars in value, I could sell it and buy a sort of mansion in Henderson, Las Vegas, or Orlando, Florida—a place big enough that I could finally trade in my Yamaha upright for a grand piano.
I know it would be ridiculous to make my wife and teenage twin daughters pack their belongings and move to Nevada or Florida so I could indulge my fantasy of “starting life over.” Such a rebirth in a new land would mostly be a chimera. No matter where I went, I’d still have Netflix, a nearby bagel place, and a Costco. I would have traveled hundreds of miles to discover that I was still me.
So as a proxy for uprooting my Southern California life, I look for smaller transformations. One has already occurred: my obsessive watch hobby.
I currently have two discrete collections, Seiko divers and G-Shocks. The Seikos are the expensive ones. I own four mechanical Seiko divers that cost between $1,200 and $3,400 apiece. I spent about $8,100 on those mechanical divers, plus another $1,200 on my iconic quartz Seiko Tuna. Altogether, I have about $9,300 sitting in a box telling time.
What amazes me is that after twenty years of manically flipping watches—buying and selling them in an addictive frenzy—I stopped buying expensive Seiko divers more than a year ago.
The last mechanical Seiko I bought, the Coastline Diver SBDC203, was purchased in August 2025. My SLA023, SLA051, SLA055, and quartz SBBN049 Tuna have been around considerably longer. This is a dramatic departure from the years when I could buy and sell a thousand-dollar watch every month as if horological instability were a medical condition.
Something changed.
I slowed down until, eventually, I stopped. I have bought nothing in the mechanical realm for more than thirteen months. There was no declaration, act of will, twelve-step program, or magical incantation. The desire simply weakened. I died to the frenzy.
During this stoppage, however, a far less expensive subcollection appeared. Over the last eight months, I accumulated a modest collection of G-Shocks: the Frogman GWF-1000, Mudman GW-9500, Mudman G-9300, Rescue GW-7900, and King GXW-56-1BJF. I also own the famous GW-5000U, although my wife has largely annexed it.
I am content with my G-Shocks. I currently have nothing on my wishlist.
Well, almost nothing.
I admire the G-Shock GWF-D1000BC with its DLC coating and combi bracelet, but it is an absurdly overqualified Hero Watch for a man who spends most of his time playing piano and doing dishes in a suburban kitchen. At $1,500, buying it would carry a faint whiff of desperation: an aging consumer hoping another cardboard box on the doorstep might generate a fresh squirt of dopamine.
I have ridden that merry-go-round enough times to know where it stops.
Buying the Frogman might produce more shame than pleasure, so I am resisting it.
My watch-wearing habits have changed as well. Ninety-five percent of the time, I wear G-Shocks. They are comfortable, atomic-time accurate, solar-powered, and worry-free. I still look at my Seiko divers and marvel at their beauty, but I no longer feel connected to them the way I once did.
They belong to my past self.
They are me living in the one-story house. They are vintage cars I take out for a ten-minute drive every four months before carefully returning them to the garage.
The G-Shocks are my new companions. The G-Shocks and I live upstairs in my imaginary mansion.
More important, the affordable G-Shocks comfort me in a way the expensive mechanical watches no longer do. Mechanical watches are beautiful little stress generators. They can require hundreds of dollars in servicing and reward your investment by keeping approximately the correct time.
My G-Shocks are Tough Solar and synchronize with the atomic clock in Fort Collins. They ask almost nothing of me.
It is as if the Invisible Retirement Sherpa whispered into my ear: “You don’t need another job flipping and worrying about expensive watches. You already have a new job. Retirement. Put on the G-Shock and get moving.”
So I did not buy a mansion in Henderson or Orlando.
I started a new life with G-Shocks.
I hunger for other changes as well, particularly regarding health and diet. Last night I dreamed I was at a party. I went into the hosts’ bathroom, pulled up my shirt, and confronted a gut that did not inspire confidence. I was overcome with dread—not simply because of my expanding lower torso but because of what it represented: a man so consumed by food noise that he could not control himself.
I lowered the watch noise.
Could I lower the food noise?
That raises a harder question: How do we lower unwanted noise in the first place? My appetite for expensive watches died largely on its own. I didn’t wrestle it into submission. Food is another matter.
And the stakes are considerably higher. Nobody ever needed an angiogram because he bought too many Seikos.
Recently I spoke with my eighty-one-year-old aunt in Minnesota. After experiencing shortness of breath and dizziness, she underwent an angiogram, the same procedure my grandfather had in his late seventies. Heart blockages have appeared on my mother’s side of the family. If changing my diet could reduce my chances of eventually following them into the cardiac catheterization lab, I would like to make that change now.
But what would that diet look like? Do I go for the gold standard and become plant-based? What happens then? Do I become a social pariah, a weirdo, a scold—the guy interrogating the waiter about chicken stock while everyone else is trying to order dinner?
And would I really care if the diet helped keep my arteries open?
So from both a health and moral standpoint, I fantasize about becoming vegan in much the same way I fantasize about moving into a mansion in Henderson. The vegan life represents another new chapter, another second story added to the house.
For now, however, veganism, like fleeing Los Angeles, remains a chimera.
Meanwhile, I am typing on a satisfyingly clicky mechanical keyboard with my trusty G-Shock Rescue on my wrist.
Change is not impossible.
Sometimes you notice only after it has already happened.
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