Cinemorphosis

Tag: life

  • Why I Bought the G-Shock Frogman

    Why I Bought the G-Shock Frogman

    If you’re buying the G-Shock Frogman GWF-1000-1JF, you need to abandon one illusion immediately: the fantasy that you are a solemn, high-minded “serious watch buyer.”

    Yes, the Frogman is a legitimate tool—ISO-rated, solar-powered, atomic-syncing, built like a bunker. It tracks tides. It handles world time. It could probably survive a minor meteor event.

    But let’s be honest.

    The Frogman is not a symbol of horological gravitas.
    It is a giant, unapologetic wrist toy.

    And that’s the point.

    This is not the watch of a restrained aesthete sipping espresso while discussing movement finishing. This is the watch of a twelve-year-old who never lost his appetite for adventure. The Frogman doesn’t whisper refinement. It shouts, Let’s go break something. It belongs just as comfortably on your wrist while you’re teaching rhetoric as it does while you’re wandering the house in gym shorts and a robe, pretending you might dive into the Pacific at any moment.

    So stop apologizing.

    Look at the thing. Smile.

    You’ve spent years marinating in the mythology of seriousness—heritage, prestige, restraint, the quiet dignity of brushed steel. Enough. Watches were never meant to be solemn artifacts of personal identity. They were meant to delight the eye, engage the hand, and give you a small surge of pleasure every time you check the time.

    What you’re practicing now is Gravitas Shedding—the psychological act of discarding the heavy costume of the “serious collector” and admitting a simple truth: if the hobby isn’t fun, it isn’t sustainable.

    Function still matters, of course. The watch should be well made, reliable, and usable. But once those boxes are checked, joy becomes the real criterion. The worst fate for any watch isn’t inadequacy—it’s boredom.

    Many enthusiasts have told me every collection needs at least one G-Shock for exactly this reason. A pressure valve. A reminder that watches don’t have to be precious.

    So after fifteen years of on-again, off-again longing, I finally did it.

    Last month I checked Sakura and saw the Frogman was out of stock. Prices on eBay were absurd. I assumed the window had closed. Case dismissed. Desire filed away.

    Then it reappeared.

    $440.
    $506 after shipping.

    Decision made.

    Now I have a new assignment: learn the dual-time function and actually use the thing when I travel. If I’m going to own a watch that can track the world, I might as well let it earn its keep.

    And I’ll admit it—I’m looking forward to the arrival more than I expected.

    I own beautiful mechanical divers. But when I picture myself in front of a classroom, talking about argument structure and logical fallacies, I don’t see a polished luxury piece on my wrist.

    I see the Frogman.

    Big. Black. Slightly ridiculous. Completely confident.

    Will it become my daily watch?
    Will it replace the others?
    Will it become my signature?

    That’s the experiment.

    The watch is on the way.

    We’ll see what happens.

  • G-Shock University: Studying for the Frogman Final Exam

    G-Shock University: Studying for the Frogman Final Exam

    My next personal project is to graduate from what I now call G-Shock University. Some people study Spanish. Others learn Italian. I, apparently, am trying to become conversational in Mode Logic.

    This is not my first attempt. Over the past twenty years, I’ve owned half a dozen G-Shocks, and every time the same thing happened: I opened the manual, felt like a tourist staring at a subway map written in hieroglyphics, panicked, and eventually sold or gave the watch away. I didn’t own the G-Shock. The G-Shock owned my anxiety.

    Not speaking the language of modes has been humiliating—like a prizefighter getting knocked out before the announcer finishes his name. But this time I want a comeback. This time I want fluency. Specifically, I want to master the Module 3184, the operating system inside the watch I’ve coveted for more than a decade: the digital Frogman GWF-1000.

    I don’t own the Frogman yet. First, I must earn it. I’m currently studying the operating guide like a nervous graduate student preparing for orals. I suffer from Mode Impostor Syndrome—the uneasy conviction that I am intellectually unqualified to own a feature-rich digital watch, combined with the quiet terror that someone will ask, “How do you switch time zones?” and I’ll freeze like a deer in tactical headlights.

    The interface is simple in theory: four buttons.
    Top left: A.
    Top right: B.
    Bottom left: C.
    Bottom right: D.

    Simple. Elegant. Also, somehow, psychologically menacing.

    Button C scrolls through the modes—the linguistic equivalent of changing verb tenses. My goal is modest. I want Timekeeping Mode set to LAX as my home city. I want World Time Mode so I can toggle easily when traveling to Miami, Cabo, or Maui. Diving logs, tide data, countdown timers, alarms—these are elective courses. I am here for conversational proficiency, not a doctorate.

    The manual’s tone is reassuring. Every complex procedure begins with a comforting phrase: First Thing You Should Do.

    The first thing, apparently, is to sit near a window. Already this feels less like a watch and more like a houseplant.

    From Timekeeping Mode, I hold A until the city code flashes. Then D moves east, B moves west, and eventually I land on LAX. Press A again to exit. Supposedly this locks in the Home City and sets the time.

    Supposedly.

    Here is where my second condition emerges: Mode Anxiety—the persistent fear that one wrong press will erase home time, activate some obscure subroutine, or send the watch into a digital wilderness from which it may never return.

    Page 6 introduces the Dual Time display. Press A to toggle between date and the selected World Time. This raises a terrifying question:
    Am I viewing another city… or accidentally reprogramming my home city to Miami?

    The last thing I need is to wake up in Torrance and discover I’m living psychologically in Florida.

    Manual time setting is even more daunting. Twelve variables: city code, DST, 12/24 format, seconds, minutes, hours, illumination duration, power saving, tone, day, month, year. This is no longer watch ownership. This is municipal governance.

    One setting, however, brings joy: button tone. Silence is essential. In Timekeeping Mode, hold A, press C nine times, toggle to Mute with D, press A to exit. At last, a victory. The watch will no longer beep like a microwave with opinions.

    Other questions remain.
    Do I need to manage DST, or will the radio signal handle it?
    How exactly do I move cleanly between Home and World Time without triggering a digital incident?

    At this point, I suspect what I really need is a one-hour Zoom session with a Professor of G-Shock Studies.

    Because this is no longer about a watch. This is about conquest.

    Like Ahab stalking the whale, I want to master the module and earn the right to wear the Frogman with confidence. What I’m really fighting is Frogman Qualification Anxiety—the belief that ownership of a high-end G-Shock must be earned through technical mastery, as if the purchase were a certification exam rather than a retail transaction.

    If I pass, I won’t just own a watch.

    I’ll finally be fluent.

  • Beauty Isn’t Enough: The Moment Desire Meets Reality

    Beauty Isn’t Enough: The Moment Desire Meets Reality

    We are, most of us, walking around with a quiet fracture. Something missing. Something we believe can be restored if only we find the right object, the right achievement, the right arrangement of circumstances. The trouble is that the very strategies we use to make ourselves whole often deepen the crack.

    Citizen Kane is the classic case study. Charles Foster Kane acquires everything—wealth, art, palaces, influence—only to die alone, whispering “Rosebud” like a man calling into an empty room. For all his possessions, he never possessed what he actually wanted: love. The sled was not valuable. It was a memory of unconditional belonging, the one thing money could not purchase.

    Once the unconscious decides that objects can deliver emotional completion, the trap is set. The shopping becomes symbolic. The acquisition becomes therapeutic. And the disappointment becomes inevitable.

    I would like to believe I’m immune to this logic. I am not.

    I’m not trying to buy love, exactly. What captures me is beauty. A gunmetal sports car. A finely finished watch. Once the image enters my field of vision, it begins to work on me. Beauty has a narcotic quality. It doesn’t argue. It persuades.

    When I was nine, my father and I would slow the car to stare at Corvettes and my personal holy object, the Opel GT. We didn’t own them. That hardly mattered. Looking was enough to induce a quiet intoxication.

    Some forms of beauty age well. Twenty years ago my wife and I bought a framed Botticelli Primavera from an antique store. It hangs in our living room today. I still find myself studying the figures, pulled into the scene as if it were unfolding in slow motion. The painting asks nothing from me except attention.

    Watches work differently.

    A beautiful watch does not merely sit on the wall. It demands a relationship. It asks to be worn, justified, integrated into daily life. And here the problem begins.

    I’m drawn to intricate designs—chronographs, textured dials, bold contrasts, mechanical drama. These pieces photograph beautifully. They mesmerize under good lighting. They whisper, You are a man of taste.

    But then I put them on.

    The dial is busy. The legibility suffers. The weight feels wrong. The watch stays in the box.

    That’s the gap—the quiet but decisive chasm between aesthetic admiration and lived use. Many of the most beautiful watches I’ve owned became box queens: admired, respected, and essentially abandoned.

    A fellow collector once told me he doesn’t mind owning watches he never wears. He thinks of them as wall art. People collect paintings for beauty; he collects watches the same way.

    I can’t do that.

    Unworn watches don’t calm me. They make me uneasy, like unfinished obligations. A watch that isn’t part of daily life feels less like art and more like a small, expensive mistake.

    Years ago, a neighbor let me drive his black Corvette—a childhood Rosebud made real. Within minutes, the spell broke. The cabin was cramped. The ride was harsh. Every bump transmitted directly into my spine. I handed back the keys with relief.

    The car looked magnificent. Living with it would have been miserable.

    That experience clarified something I’ve come to accept across watches, cars, and most objects of desire:

    Beauty alone is not enough.

    At some point, every enthusiast discovers a personal boundary—what might be called a Functional Integrity Threshold. It’s the moment when aesthetic appeal loses its authority because the object fails in comfort, usability, or daily harmony.

    Below that threshold, beauty is intoxicating.
    Beyond it, beauty becomes irrelevant.

    Give me both—form and function in alignment—or give me neither. Anything else is just another Rosebud waiting to disappoint.

  • Bracelet Ambivalence Disorder: When Steel Looks Right But Feels Wrong 

    Bracelet Ambivalence Disorder: When Steel Looks Right But Feels Wrong 

    About two years ago, after more than two decades in the watch hobby, I developed a new condition. It arrived quietly, without warning, sometime around 2024.

    I became ambivalent about bracelets.

    I suspect the trouble began with my Seiko SLA055. It came on Seiko’s chocolate-bar rubber—an arrangement I never learned to love. The sliding metal keeper felt cheap, the rubber looked underdressed, and the whole thing struck me as unworthy of a watch north of three thousand dollars.

    So I did what any rational enthusiast would do. I spent over a thousand dollars chasing the perfect strap.

    Most were disappointments. One survived: the FKM Divecore. For a brief moment, peace. Then came the study about FKM and the whispers of “forever chemicals,” and suddenly my sanctuary felt like a toxic waste site.

    Back to the drawing board.

    I finally bought the Seiko bracelet from the SLA077. Four hundred dollars. And I have to admit: it transformed the watch. Steel gave it authority. Gravity. Presence. The same thing happened with my SLA023 and the Tuna SBBN049. On bracelets, these watches don’t just look good—they look heroic. Complete. Like they’ve put on their uniforms.

    So what’s the problem?

    The obvious answers come first. Bracelets are heavier. Links press into the wrist at odd angles. Sizing becomes a seasonal engineering project as weight and weather shift. All true.

    But none of that explains the deeper resistance.

    Because the truth is, this isn’t about comfort. It’s about identity.

    Straps represent something to me: restraint, practicality, anti-bling minimalism. Being “the strap guy” feels like a moral position. Seven watches on rubber feels orderly. Clean. Controlled. And in the strange psychology of collecting, control is another word for happiness.

    Except the mind doesn’t stay controlled for long.

    After months of strap purity, I start craving variety. Maybe one bracelet. Maybe two. A little diversity. A little steel.

    And that’s when the real problem begins.

    The moment a watch goes on a bracelet, it becomes a box queen.

    I tell myself I’m saving it for special occasions. But special occasions turn out to mean a birthday dinner twice a year. Meanwhile, the watch sits in the box, looking magnificent and doing absolutely nothing.

    This morning, after a post-workout nap, I woke up with a plan. Enough of this. I would remove the bracelets from the three offenders and restore order.

    Then I opened the watch box.

    And there they were—those watches on steel—looking perfect. Finished. Complete. Like museum pieces that had finally been framed correctly.

    I couldn’t do it.

    So here I am typing this while wearing my Seiko Uemura SLA051 on an MM300 waffle, fully aware of a simple truth:

    If this watch were on a bracelet, it would still be sitting in the box.

    At this point, I don’t see a solution. I’ve stopped looking for one. This is simply another occupational hazard of the enthusiast’s life.

    I suffer from Bracelet Ambivalence Disorder—the chronic inability to commit to either straps or bracelets, marked by alternating attraction and avoidance. Bracelets are admired. Straps are worn. The heart wants steel. The wrist wants rubber.

    If anyone else suffers from this condition, please make yourself known.

    Misery, like stainless steel, feels lighter when shared.

  • The Psychology of Watch Regret

    The Psychology of Watch Regret

    Many watch obsessives suffer from a peculiar torment: they cannot live with a certain watch—and they cannot live without it.

    I know men who have bought, sold, and rebought the same Seiko Tuna a dozen times. Some have done the same dance with the MM300. The watch leaves. Relief follows. Then memory begins its quiet revision. The flaws soften. The virtues glow. Soon the search begins again.

    If you stay in this hobby long enough, you may find yourself performing the same ritual.

    First comes infatuation. The watch arrives. For a few weeks it feels inevitable, permanent, right. Then something shifts. It wears too large. Too heavy. Too shiny. Too common. The magic drains out. Now the watch feels like a mistake that must be corrected immediately.

    You list it on eBay. You price it aggressively. You take the loss. You feel lighter, cleaner, restored.

    Three months later you’re browsing photos of the very same model.

    This time it looks perfect.

    You buy it back at full price.

    The cycle repeats. Sell low. Buy high. Repeat until the watch has cost you the price of a small used car. Some collectors eventually place the piece in a safe—not for protection from thieves, but from themselves.

    There is a darker variation.

    You sell the watch. Regret arrives. You go looking for it again.

    But now it’s gone.

    No listings. No used examples. No inventory anywhere. The watch has slipped into the market’s shadow, and your memory transforms it into something mythic. You dream about it. You refresh search pages like a man checking hospital monitors. You wake up with the emotional intensity of a breakup and the soundtrack of the Chi-Lites playing somewhere in your head.

    Have you seen her?

    This condition has a name: The Acquisition Reversal Loop—the compulsive pattern in which a collector sells a watch to escape dissatisfaction, only to experience renewed desire and repurchase the same model, often at repeated financial loss.

    The loop is not about watches. It is about unstable desire.

    A healthy hobby is supposed to add pleasure and structure to your life. The Acquisition Reversal Loop does the opposite. It erodes judgment. Preferences become volatile. Decisions become emotional. The collector begins to resemble a child—grabbing, rejecting, reclaiming, and insisting that this time the object will finally make everything right.

    This is not enthusiasm. It is regression.

    At this point the watches are no longer possessions. They are orbiting objects in a private gravitational field of anxiety and impulse.

    And when a hobby turns into a system that repeatedly empties your wallet, disturbs your peace, and overrides your judgment, it is no longer a pastime.

    It is a small, well-lit prison.

    The question is no longer which watch to buy.

    The question is how—and whether—you intend to leave.

  • Horological Deconversion: When the Romance Finally Breaks

    Horological Deconversion: When the Romance Finally Breaks

    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.

  • Why a G-Shock Frogman Makes More Sense Than a Mechanical Collection

    Why a G-Shock Frogman Makes More Sense Than a Mechanical Collection

    If you come to me and confess that you’re curious about my watch hobby—intrigued, even—and ask for guidance so you can pursue the passion with the same enthusiasm, I won’t welcome you into the brotherhood.

    I’ll stop you at the door.

    If you are currently free from thoughts of watches, I will advise you to remain free. Walk away. Continue your life as a relatively sane and solvent human being. Because the mechanical watch hobby, viewed without romance or nostalgia, makes less and less sense in the modern world.

    You are paying premium money for obsolete technology in an age that worships useful technology. Why spend six thousand dollars on a Swiss machine that tells you the time when a five-hundred-dollar fitness watch can monitor your heart, track your sleep, detect arrhythmias, and quietly send your vital signs to your doctor before you collapse in a parking lot?

    Mechanical watches don’t make you healthier. They make you sentimental.

    The future is not kind to sentiment. As the world moves away from mechanical timekeeping, competent service will become slower, rarer, and more expensive. Your treasured watch will eventually be packed into a padded box and shipped across the country—or the ocean—where it will sit for months awaiting lubrication, regulation, or a gasket replacement. When it returns scratched, delayed, or mysteriously altered, you’ll enter a corporate complaint system so backlogged it feels less like customer service and more like geological time.

    Meanwhile, the social currency that once justified the expense is quietly evaporating.

    There was a time when a fine mechanical watch signaled professional success. Doctors noticed. Lawyers noticed. Bankers noticed. Today, most people don’t know a Rolex from a Fossil, and many don’t notice watches at all. The design language of luxury horology is becoming a private dialect spoken by a shrinking tribe.

    This is where the collector encounters Analog Futility Syndrome: the slow, uncomfortable realization that enormous resources are being poured into a technology that no longer solves a modern problem. The pleasure remains—but it is shadowed by a faint, persistent question: Why am I doing this?

    Meanwhile, the cultural signaling has inverted.

    Show up wearing a $500 solar-powered G-Shock that works everywhere, never needs service, survives abuse, and keeps atomic time, and people read something entirely different. Efficiency. Practical intelligence. Optimization. The G-Shock wearer looks like a person who solves problems, not one who collects them. The same watch works at the office, on a trail, or on a flight across time zones. It whispers competence. It suggests you might belong to MENSA. Or at least that you don’t spend your evenings arguing about bezel fonts.

    So if you ask me how to become a watch enthusiast, I will not guide you toward Swiss luxury and its Ferrari-like maintenance costs. I will point you toward the solar, radio-controlled, GPS-enabled tools that actually serve a modern life.

    A GPS Master of G Rangeman.
    A radio-controlled square.
    The digital Frogman.

    Real time anywhere. Light weight. Near-zero maintenance. Functional serenity.

    Writing this advice to you has caused something strange to happen to me while composing it. The argument has pointed an accusatory finger toward me. What began as guidance for you has become a prosecution of my imbecilic watch hobby.

    The longer I write, the more irritated I become at my own years of horological excess—years spent chasing mechanical romance while quietly accumulating cost, inconvenience, and low-grade anxiety.

    I may have to sell everything.

    I may have to replace the entire collection with a single indestructible digital watch and walk away.

    You think I’m exaggerating. I am not.

    Writing this has triggered a full-blown Horological Renunciation Fantasy: the emotionally charged vision of liquidating every mechanical piece and replacing them with one maintenance-free instrument—liberation not from watches, but from the psychological gravity of owning too many of them.

    The fantasy is seductive. I can’t imagine being happy right now unless I sell all my mechanicals and replace them with a digital Frogman.

    And that should tell you everything you need to know about the hobby.

  • The High Isn’t the Watch–It’s the Rabbit Hole

    The High Isn’t the Watch–It’s the Rabbit Hole

    One of my favorite pastimes is watching YouTube comparison videos of the Toyota Camry vs. the Honda Accord. I’m not shopping for a car. I don’t need a car. I may never buy another car. 

    But these videos? They soothe the savage beast inside of me. They go down like a smooth bourbon, with notes of ABS braking and a smoky finish of fuel economy.

    While others go to YouTube to meditate or do yoga, I fall into the hypnotic cadence of two grown men comparing rear-seat legroom and infotainment systems with the solemnity of Cold War negotiators. 

    I’m riveted. Parsing the pros and cons of these two sedans gives me a focus so intense it borders on religious ecstasy. I study engine specs like they’re verses from Leviticus. My concentration sharpens, my anxiety fades. I am, for a brief and blissful moment, free.

    And then it hits me: I don’t want the car. I want the focus. The Camry and Accord are just placeholders in the temple of obsession.

    This revelation sheds light on my watch obsession. It helps me realize that acquiring a watch in most cases is a bitter letdown. A $3,000 watch on the wrist is like a Tinder date at Denny’s: out of place and super embarrassing. 

    I’ve worn $5,000 watches while taking my daughters to YogurtLand and I’ve said to myself, “Dude, you’ve lost the plot.”

    How did I get here with expensive watches that I wear when I’m buying pretzels and diet soda at Target?

    And then I realize. The same drive to focus on Camry-Accord comparisons is the same drive that makes me do “timepiece research.”  Watching my fellow timepiece obsessives drool over bezels and lume shots is the real high. That’s what lights me up. That’s what gets the adrenaline surging through my veins. 

    So as watch obsessives, we need to understand that, even more than watches, we are addicted to focus. We are afflicted with Focus Addiction–the true dependency hiding beneath consumer desire: the craving for intense, narrowing concentration that drowns out modern life’s chaos, even if it must be chemically replicated through YouTube reviews and lume shots.

    I’ve spent years confusing consumer acquisition with personal transformation. Getting this thing or that thing will change me inside. I want to be courageous, dignified, courteous, disciplined, fit, and healthy. A watch can’t redeem me. It can’t make me whole. It can’t make me the person I wish I were. Not once have I ever put a new watch on my wrist, gave my wife a wrist shot, and said, “Look, honey, I’ve achieved a metamorphosis.”

    She’ll just look at me and say, “Dude, clean the leaves out of the rain gutters.”

    The material thing in my hands is a letdown because what I really want is the chase and the intense focus. The glorious plunge down a rabbit hole lined with brushed stainless steel and leather-wrapped dashboards. My consumerism isn’t about consumption—it’s about cultivating a state of intense obsession that drowns out the shrieking absurdity of modern life.

    So no more mistaking adrenaline for fulfillment. No more clicking “Buy Now” hoping for transcendence in a shipping box. 

    I’ll keep researching. That’s my Prozac. That’s my monastery. 

    But buying something has proven to be a fool’s errand. And if doing so-called research inflames my consumer appetites, then I should probably put my foot on the brakes when it comes to the research because it can be a prelude to making a purchase I don’t want to make.

    Let me give you an analogy. Let’s say you’re back in high school and you’re at the high school dance, but your girlfriend isn’t there because she’s on a ski trip. While bored at the dance, your ex shows up. She looks more beautiful than you remember her. She approaches you and asks you to dance. “Nothing will happen,” she says. “It will be completely innocent.” You dance with her and something happens. 

    That’s what watch research is like. You tell yourself the research is innocent. You’re just reading forums. Watching a video or two. Maybe checking inventory. 

    But then you wake up and you’re shopping at Target with a $5,000 watch on your wrist and you feel both embarrassed and ashamed.

    Doing research on watches is like having that dance with your ex-girlfriend: Something is going to happen. And it’s not going to be pretty. 

    Have a wonderful day, everyone. Don’t forget to smash that Like button of your soul.

  • How Watch Collectors Lie to Themselves About “Finding Their Style”

    How Watch Collectors Lie to Themselves About “Finding Their Style”

    I recently made a YouTube video arguing that a man should not chase variety in his watch collection but instead find his signature style and whittle his hoard down to a tasteful few. Like a monk with only one robe. Or a chef with one good knife. Or a middle-aged guy who knows that buying yet another GMT won’t fix his marriage.

    Now, did I believe what I was saying? Not entirely. I was, to be honest, talking myself off the ledge. It was a kind of public self-hypnosis: say it enough times on camera, and maybe I’ll stop buying watches I never wear. But I’ll admit—the thought experiment was stimulating, like sniffing ammonia salts just to feel something. Most commenters agreed, saying peace of mind only arrived after purging the herd. But not all. Some insisted that a large, diverse collection brings them genuine joy. Fair. Not everyone needs to live like a horological monk.

    Still, I enjoyed making the video. It felt like intellectual calisthenics for the soul, even if it didn’t convert me.

    One viewer, the formidable “Captain Nolan,” asked a deceptively simple question that demands more than a quick reply:

    “How can you discover your identity without trying watches in every category—divers, pilots, field watches, dress, digital, mechanical, quartz, and so on?”

    By “identity,” he means your taste. What fits your lifestyle, your aesthetic, your internal brand. A fair question. And at first, I answered like a smug adolescent. I said, “You know what you like the same way I knew Raquel Welch was the apex of female beauty when I was nine. One glance. No need to watch Love American Style reruns or thumb through Vogue. Case closed.”

    But that answer is glib. And idiotic. Taste in watches—unlike adolescent lust—is not a hormonal thunderclap. It’s a process.

    So here’s the grown-up answer: yes, you do need to try different styles, just like trying on jackets at Nordstrom. Some are flattering, some make you look like a Bulgarian hitman. It’s tactile. Visceral. And wildly expensive. To really figure out your taste, you may end up spending $5,000 to $10,000 just to land in the right neighborhood. You might call this the Fitting Room Narrative—the idea that trying on a wide range of watches will help you find the “real you.”

    It sounds rational. Comforting, even. But I don’t believe in it.

    The problem is the human brain. It’s not a spreadsheet. It’s a haunted house full of desires, delusions, and marketing fumes. So let me propose a more honest theory: Fever Swamp Accretion–the uncontrolled phase of acquisition in which watches multiply faster than self-awareness. Purpose is retroactively assigned; sanity is postponed.

    Here’s how it works:

    You fall headfirst into the hobby. You start buying watches the way a toddler grabs Halloween candy. You buy microbrand divers, G-Shocks, Speedmasters, and maybe a Rolex or two if your credit limit allows it. You tell yourself each one serves a “purpose.” You start spending a grand a month, easy. Over ten years, you’ve spent more than most people do on therapy. And God knows you need therapy.

    Eventually, the collection metastasizes. Dozens of watches, each one representing a temporary high. You stop wearing half of them. You obsess over straps, bezels, lume. Your identity fuses with your hobby. You’re no longer a man who wears watches; you’re a man being worn by them.

    Then comes the collapse: financial strain, marital tension, the vacant stare of a man wondering why he owns three identical Seikos. Maybe you go through a breakup or foreclosure. Maybe your friends stage an intervention. Maybe your dog leaves you. Think about that. Your watch obsession got so bad your dog abandoned you. 

    You finally tap out. Sell the collection. Keep three. Or two. Or one. You tell yourself you’re “cured.”

    Except… maybe you’re not. Maybe, like Bell’s palsy or a bad ex, the obsession lies dormant. All it takes is one random trigger—a stressful day, a YouTube thumbnail, a flash sale—and you relapse. Buy a Sinn. Then a Squale. Then you’re back in the swamp.

    Why do we cling to the Fitting Room Narrative when it’s so obviously false? Because it has a tidy structure. A clean arc. Beginning, middle, resolution. We’re narrative junkies. We want our Luke Skywalkers to finish Jedi school and never regress. 

    Same with watch collectors. We want the Watch Ninja to overcome his demons and live a Zen life with a single Grand Seiko. If he relapses, we unsubscribe. He becomes a punchline. Another Liver King of horology.

    Still don’t believe me? Consider Pete Rose. In the ‘70s, he was “Charlie Hustle,” the human embodiment of work ethic. But zoom out, and the myth crumbles. Pete wasn’t disciplined—he was compulsive. He gambled, lied, betrayed friends. The man was a walking cautionary tale wrapped in a Cincinnati Reds jersey.

    Or take Sedona. Supposedly a spiritual vortex. In reality, a commercialized fever dream of overpriced crystals, green juice, and pseudo-mystical hokum. You arrive expecting transcendence and leave with a maxed-out credit card and lower back pain from a “chakra realignment.”

    We love myths because they sell. But real life is more complicated. Messier. Less flattering.

    So I could tell you a satisfying tale about finding my “true self” through curating a humble collection of retro divers and minimalist field watches. I could wrap it all up with a bow. But I won’t. Because that would be fiction.

    And honestly, haven’t we had enough of that?

  • Absolutes and the Ruin of Watch Collecting

    Absolutes and the Ruin of Watch Collecting

    It’s often said that comparison is the mother of misery. No matter how high you climb in any pursuit, there’s always someone perched above you, dangling their boots over the edge. The distance between you and them can feel vast—so vast it erases the climb you already made. In watch collecting, this happens fast. You finally land your grail: a Seiko GMT diver that cost real money, money that made you flinch. You admire it. You feel complete. Then a friend casually flashes a five-thousand-dollar Grand Seiko and—poof—your triumph collapses. You don’t feel lucky. You feel inadequate.

    If comparison is the mother of misery, then she has a meddlesome sister. Call her Aunt Absolute. Aunt Absolute is just as ruinous. She whispers that contentment requires perfection. Not just a great watch, but the right watch. Not just a collection, but the collection. The correct rotation. The correct strap. The correct bracelet. She promises peace once everything clicks into place forever.

    This hunger for absolutes usually rides shotgun with an OCD streak in the hobby. The flaw in that mindset is simple: the hobby refuses to stay still. Tastes change. Knowledge deepens. Bodies age. Jobs shift. Moods fluctuate. Absolutes hate variables, and watch collecting is nothing but variables. To the absolutist, change feels like threat, and threat breeds anxiety. In its ugliest form, that anxiety convinces you your collection is one wrong move away from collapse. Sell a watch. Swap a strap. Wear a bracelet again. The whole thing topples. This is Jenga Anxiety—the chronic fear that a single adjustment will destabilize not just your watches, but the identity you’ve built around them. Adaptability feels like fragility. Experimentation feels like self-destruction.

    I lived under Aunt Absolute’s roof for about two years. I refused bracelets entirely. Every watch sat on Divecore FKM straps. The system was clean. The rules were rigid. I was happy—until the FKM “forever chemical” scare cracked the foundation. I reassessed. I adjusted. Now four watches live on straps and four on bracelets. The collection breathes. I have options. And yes, I forgot how good a bracelet can feel until I let myself enjoy one again.

    That experiment proved something important. I didn’t need absolutes to enjoy the hobby. I didn’t need perfection. Flexibility wasn’t failure—it was freedom. The watches didn’t lose meaning when the rules softened. They gained it.

    Will I stay flexible, or will I drift back toward absolutism? History suggests vigilance is required. But if I feel Aunt Absolute tugging at my sleeve again, I’ll remind myself of a simple truth: absolutism is the aunt of misery.