Tag: writing

Seven Watches Have Made Me Contemplate the Tyranny of Want

I was raised to believe that wanting something was reason enough to have it.

Not a suggestion. Not a temptation. A principle.

In the 60s and 70s, appetite was rebranded as intelligence. If you knew how to indulge—food, gadgets, experiences—you weren’t weak. You were evolved. The man who said no looked like a malfunction: tight-lipped, joyless, possibly afraid of his own shadow.

The rest of us were out there chasing pleasure like it was a civic duty.

And I didn’t just participate—I specialized.

I built a life around calibrated indulgence. Watches, food, stimulation. I didn’t impulse-buy; I strategized. I had rotations, hierarchies, justification frameworks. I could explain any purchase with the calm authority of a man who had already made the purchase.

Which is why it’s unsettling—borderline alarming—that I now feel relief that my watch collection is down to seven.

Seven.

At one point, seven watches would have been the warm-up act. Now it feels like silence after a fire alarm. Manageable. Contained. Almost peaceful.

Out of curiosity, I tried to imagine adding just one more watch.

Not buying it—just imagining it.

Within seconds, I felt the familiar anxiety spool up: Where does it fit? When do I wear it? What does it replace? What problem is it solving that doesn’t exist?

That’s when the illusion cracked.

What I used to call “expanding the collection” was actually expanding the burden.

Which led to a thought I’ve spent most of my life avoiding:

What if self-denial isn’t deprivation?
What if it’s relief?

This idea runs against decades of conditioning. My instincts are trained like a high-performance lab animal: stimulus, response, reward. See it. Want it. Acquire it. Repeat until the dopamine system starts filing complaints.

And yet the results are undeniable.

The next watch doesn’t calm me—it destabilizes me.
The next meal doesn’t satisfy me—it expands me.
The next YouTube video doesn’t enlighten me—it hooks me into a slot machine where the jackpot is always one more spin away.

Different behaviors. Same engine.

I’ve spent years obeying impulses that don’t know how to stop—and calling that freedom.

Now I’m starting to see it for what it is: a feedback loop that promises satisfaction and delivers agitation.

So I’m experimenting with a radical intervention.

Not buying the watch.
Not eating the extra food.
Not clicking the next video.

It sounds trivial. It feels trivial. But it isn’t.

Because when you interrupt the impulse—even once—you discover something unexpected: nothing collapses. The urgency fades. The world keeps spinning. You’re still here.

And in that small gap between wanting and doing, something rare appears.

Control.

Self-denial, it turns out, is not a punishment. It’s leverage.

It’s the ability to step between impulse and action and say, “Not this time.” It’s the quiet refusal that breaks the loop. It doesn’t feel dramatic. It feels almost boring. But it works.

Which raises a question I can’t quite shake:

Why did no one make this case to me when I was younger?

Or did they—and I dismissed it because it sounded like the philosophy of people who weren’t having any fun?

Would I have listened? Or would I have reacted the way anyone reacts when you threaten their favorite addiction—with polite skepticism covering a deeper hostility?

Tonight, the old circuitry is still humming.

There’s hunger—not real hunger, but the kind that shows up after dinner with a marketing pitch.
There’s restlessness—the urge to check something, watch something, consume something.
There’s the gravitational pull toward the kitchen and the screen.

I know how this ends.

Stay up late, and discipline dissolves. You eat something unnecessary while watching something forgettable and go to bed slightly disappointed in both.

So I try something different.

Go to sleep.

End the day before the impulses take over.

It’s not heroic. It won’t trend. No one is going to applaud the man who defeated temptation by becoming unconscious.

But it might be the smartest move I make all day.

And still—because habits don’t die quietly—the voice is there, smooth as ever:

I’ll deny myself.

Just not yet.

March 19, 2026
Abducted by My Hygienist, Grounded by Reality

My dentist—one year younger than I am, which in our age bracket feels less like a difference and more like a rounding error—peered into my mouth and delivered his verdict with clinical calm: two abrasions, self-inflicted, the result of brushing with the zeal of a man trying to erase his past. They would need fillings. Then, without missing a beat, he pivoted from my dental erosion to his own existential one. At sixty-three, he said, fatigue had begun to collect in the corners of his life. Travel, once a pleasure, had become an ordeal. He had lost interest in vacations altogether.

He offered evidence. His sister-in-law had been stranded in Dubai while missiles stitched the sky over Iran. When she finally escaped, her flight climbed higher than usual to avoid the problem of being blown out of the sky—a detail that tends to sour the in-flight experience. Twenty hours later she landed in Dallas, dazed and displaced, only to discover she still needed to purchase a separate ticket to get home to Los Angeles. The modern vacation: a geopolitical obstacle course with snacks.

I told him I understood completely. I, too, have entered the era of strategic energy management. I work out five days a week, yes—but I also schedule two naps a day with the seriousness of board meetings. Europe, at this point, feels less like a destination and more like a test of endurance. Cabo I can handle—two hours, a controlled burst. Miami, perhaps, if I marshal my resources. But a transatlantic flight? The return on investment collapses. The juice is no longer worth the squeeze.

While we were discussing the slow recalibration of ambition, his technician went to work on my teeth with a collection of instruments that sounded like extraterrestrial diplomats arguing through a metal wall. Half sedated by the hum and whine, I drifted into the plausible conclusion that I had been abducted. Not metaphorically—literally. I was on a ship, somewhere above the atmosphere, being examined by beings who had mastered interstellar travel but still hadn’t figured out how to make dental procedures pleasant.

Eventually, they released me—back into the chair, back into my life—with instructions to gargle fluoride and abstain from food and water for thirty minutes. The kind of post-op protocol that suggests the aliens, for all their advancements, remain deeply committed to inconvenience.

March 18, 2026
My 57-Minute Relationship with the G-Shock GW-6900

I got home at 5:00 p.m. to find my Amazon package waiting for me like a promise I didn’t remember making. Inside: the G-Shock GW-6900, the much-celebrated Three-Eyed Monster. I unboxed it, performed the usual initiation rituals—set it to LAX, marched through the modes, customized everything like a man preparing a command center—and then attempted the simplest task imaginable: return to Timekeeping.

Impossible.

No matter what I pressed, held, or pleaded with, the watch snapped back to UTC like a bureaucrat rejecting incomplete paperwork. I consulted the manual. I consulted YouTube. I even consulted AI, that modern oracle of last resort. Nothing. The watch refused to cooperate, as if it had been programmed with a small but firm sense of contempt.

Meanwhile, the physical object itself began to lose its charm under scrutiny. Next to the Frogman and the 7900, the 6900 felt… cheap and underfed. Lighter, cheaper, less resolved. The strap clung to my wrist like it had second thoughts about the relationship—barely long enough, noticeably less comfortable. This wasn’t a heroic tool watch. This was a compromise wearing a reputation.

The decision arrived with unusual clarity: return it.

By 5:57 p.m., I had already processed its return on Amazon, dropped it off at the nearby UPS, and said good riddance. It is now on its way back to wherever failed expectations are processed. I had made the round trip—anticipation, confusion, disappointment, rejection—in under an hour. A full consumer arc compressed into a sitcom episode.

Now the house is quiet again. Seven watches remain. The cognitive clutter has thinned. No more scrolling through modes like a man trapped in a digital maze. No more negotiating with a watch that refuses to tell time on command.

The 6900 is gone.

And for the first time today, everything is exactly where it should be, and I can now move forward with my life.

Update:

Two friends messaged me to explain that with the 6900 you don’t press the upper left button to exit UTC and get into Timekeeping. You press the upper right button, so the watch was probably not defective. But it was so inferior to the 7900 in terms of build quality and strap length that I’m glad I returned it.

March 17, 2026
Lecture Drift Syndrome and the Vanishing Classroom

My students have been reporting a peculiar academic phenomenon: the two-hour class that contains no discernible lesson. In its place stands a performer—a professor intoxicated by the belief that a self-indulgent monologue is effective teaching. Convinced they possess the sacred “gift of gab,” they proceed to use it like a leaf blower in a library.

And gab they do.

They narrate their dreams with the seriousness of a Jungian symposium, decoding every symbol as if the subconscious were filing quarterly reports. They recount contractor disputes with the dramatic tension of courtroom testimony. They offer serialized updates on family feuds, restaurant conquests, tropical vacations, and medical procedures so vivid they border on malpractice to describe. They even resurrect their collegiate glory days, in which they allegedly outwitted professors and classmates alike—a mythos delivered with the confidence of a man who has never been fact-checked.

Meanwhile, the classroom undergoes a quiet evacuation.

Not physically—students remain seated, dutiful, nodding at appropriate intervals—but cognitively, the room is abandoned. One student is deep into a novel. Another is solving calculus proofs. Several are toggling between sports highlights and sports betting apps, hedging their attention the way day traders hedge risk. Text messages fly. Homework from other classes gets completed. What was scheduled as instruction has been repurposed into a supervised study hall with a live podcast no one asked to attend.

The professor, of course, notices none of this.

This is the defining pathology: two monumental blind spots. First, the inability to recognize that the monologue is not merely irrelevant but actively draining—an intellectual sedative administered over two uninterrupted hours. Second, the delusion that presence equals engagement, that a room full of bodies must also be a room full of minds.

It is neither.

What we are witnessing is an academic epidemic: Lecture Drift Syndrome. A condition in which a class session slowly detaches from its stated purpose and floats into the open sea of anecdote, confession, and self-display. The syllabus becomes a relic. Time warps—two hours pass, yet nothing has been learned. Themes dissolve. Structure collapses. The lecture doesn’t end so much as it dissipates.

In the end, the classroom is no longer a site of instruction.

It is a stage occupied by one man talking—and thirty students elsewhere.

March 17, 2026
Acid-Washed Jeans and Artificial Intelligence: The Rise and Fall of Instant Cool

I have a confession that belongs in the Museum of Bad Decisions: I wore acid-washed jeans in the 80s. Not casually. Not ironically. I wore them to teach college writing at twenty-four, convinced I was the cool professor—the kind of man who could annotate a thesis statement and headline a Duran Duran video without changing outfits.

The problem, of course, is that everyone thought they were that guy. Acid-washed jeans thrived because they delivered instant mythology. You looked like you had lived—hard, fast, dangerously—when in reality you had simply survived a trip to the mall. They were rebellion by chemical treatment, authenticity by rinse cycle. For a brief, glittering moment, that illusion worked. But illusions collapse under mass adoption. When everyone looks distressed, no one looks interesting. The jeans had nowhere to go; they began at maximum volume and stayed there, screaming. Eventually, the culture regained its hearing, glanced downward, and realized it had dressed itself like survivors of a denim-related explosion. Acid wash didn’t fade—it was exiled.

I think about that rise and fall when I look at my students’ shifting attitude toward AI. In 2022, AI arrived like those jeans: a miracle fabric promising salvation from drudgery, writer’s block, and the existential dread of the blank page. It offered pre-fabricated brilliance—the intellectual version of showing up to the gym already sweating. Students embraced it with the same breathless certainty that this time, finally, the shortcut would make them exceptional.

Now? They roll their eyes. They call it cringey.

What changed is not the technology but the perception of authenticity. Factory-installed insight, like factory-installed distress, has become suspect. My students are not naïve; they have finely tuned detectors for fraud. They live in a world saturated with performance—the influencer selling a life they don’t live, the hollow expert recycling borrowed ideas, the unprepared instructor filling class time by sharing his dreams and domestic dramas while they politely tune him out and read Tolstoy’s War and Peace or the entire oeuvre of J.K. Rowling.

AI, at its worst, slots neatly into that ecosystem. It produces language that sounds like thinking without the inconvenience of actually thinking. And my students can hear the hollowness.

This does not mean AI is useless. At its best, it belongs alongside Word, Google Docs, and Grammarly—a tool, not a personality. But tools do not build a self. They do not generate voice, conviction, or the slow accumulation of insight that makes writing worth reading. Lean on them too heavily, and the result isn’t mastery—it’s dependency dressed up as efficiency.

My students understand this. That’s why the fever has broken. The early hype—the belief that AI would function as a kind of intellectual superpower—has lost its grip. The spell didn’t shatter because AI failed. It shattered because people learned to recognize the difference between something that helps you think and something that pretends to think for you.

Acid-washed jeans didn’t disappear because denim stopped working. They disappeared because people grew embarrassed of the shortcut.

AI isn’t going anywhere.

But the illusion that it can make you interesting just by wearing it?

That’s already out of style.

March 17, 2026
Why I’m Not Fully G-Shockified (Yet)
A month ago, I fell—hard—for the G-Shock Frogman GWF-1000. Not a mild infatuation. Not a passing curiosity. A full conversion experience. Within days, I recruited two accomplices—the GW-7900 Rescue and the GW-6900 Three-Eyed Monster—and suddenly my mechanical divers, once the crown jewels of my collection, were sitting in the watch box like retired prizefighters telling stories no one asked to hear.

Let me be clear: I have not renounced them. I still admire the Seiko SLA055. I still regard the quartz Tuna SBBN049 with something close to reverence. But admiration is not the same as use. Once you’ve tasted atomic time—precise, indifferent, quietly superior—it’s difficult to return to the charming imprecision of mechanical watches. You don’t switch back from filtered water to a garden hose unless nostalgia is doing the driving.

And I’m not alone. Since confessing my condition, I’ve received a steady stream of testimonials. Men who bought a GW-M5610 or a GW-5000U and quietly stopped wearing everything else. Not because they planned to. Not because they declared war on their collections. But because the G-Shock—comfortable, accurate, frictionless—refused to leave their wrist. Their curiosity still wandered, their addiction still whispered, but the watch stayed put. Anchored. Unmoved.

This phenomenon deserves a name: G-Shockification.

It is the moment when a watch enthusiast, steeped in the romance of mechanical horology, is overtaken by the brute efficiency of atomic precision. At first, there is resistance. Then rationalization. Finally, surrender. Variety collapses. The rotation dies. The watch box becomes a museum, and the G-Shock becomes the only living artifact. What began as a hobby turns into a single, dominant habit—quiet, practical, and oddly liberating.

Some resist the change. Some embrace it. Some preach it like a new religion. But they all share one outcome: the mechanical watch, once a daily companion, becomes an occasional guest.

Which brings me to the uncomfortable question: Have I been G-Shockified?

The honest answer is: not quite.

I have my objections. With a G-Shock, I cannot simply glance at the time. I must present the watch to my face like an offering, or press a button and summon light—an act that triggers a faint but persistent anxiety about draining the solar charge. In a dark movie theater, the problem becomes almost philosophical. Do I illuminate my wrist and disrupt the room? Or do I behave like a civilized adult and wear something else?

This is where the quartz Tuna reenters the story.

Since my G-Shock conversion began, the Tuna has enjoyed a quiet renaissance. It is as if atomic time granted me permission to appreciate quartz accuracy without guilt. At night, it is flawless—constant lume, instant readability, no negotiation required. It does not ask for a button press. It does not demand a ritual. It simply tells the time, like a professional.

And so I arrive at a compromise.

I am not fully G-Shockified because I am not willing to tolerate certain frictions: the angle-sensitive readability, the dependence on backlight, the small social calculations about when it is appropriate to illuminate my wrist. These are minor issues, but they are enough to prevent total surrender.

What I have instead is something more complicated: Hybridification.

My collection is now split down the middle—four analog watches, four G-Shocks. This is not harmony. It is a negotiated settlement. The G-Shocks govern precision, durability, and daily utility. The analog watches—especially the Tuna—reclaim territory where immediate readability and luminous clarity matter.

The result is a managed tension between two philosophies:
- the digital world of accuracy, convenience, and indifference
- the analog world of presence, legibility, and quiet satisfaction
It is not a perfect system. But it is stable.

For now.
March 17, 2026
The Seiko Tuna Epiphany: A Late-Night Strategy for Escaping Watch Madness

Last night, while watching television with my wife in a room lit about as brightly as a submarine corridor, I made a small but unsettling discovery: I am not always in the mood to press the G-Shock light button just to see the time. Not because the button is difficult—it isn’t—but because every tap reminds me that I’m siphoning a little solar life from the battery. For a normal person, this would register as trivia. For someone like me, it becomes a moral drama about energy management.

Earlier that day both my G-Shocks—the Frogman and the GW-7900—were sitting at the dreaded Medium charge level. Medium is technically acceptable, but emotionally intolerable. So I placed them on the windowsill for four hours like two reptiles basking on a warm rock. By evening they had risen to the only status that calms my nervous system: High.

Wanting to give their solar batteries a night of rest—and perhaps to give my brain a rest as well—I hung the GW-7900 on the industrial T-bar stand so it could quietly chase atomic signals overnight. In its place I strapped on my quartz Seiko Tuna SBBN049. The room was dark, but the Tuna’s lume glowed like a tiny lighthouse. No button pressing. No anxiety about draining solar reserves. Just the quiet satisfaction of luminous markers doing their job without negotiation.

And something interesting happened: I rediscovered the Tuna.

While I’ve been cooling off from my mechanical divers, this quartz brute suddenly felt…perfect. Reliable. Legible. Calm. A watch that does not demand emotional supervision.

Then a second realization arrived.

The Tuna—already equipped with sapphire—might quietly occupy the exact niche I’ve been trying to justify filling with the sapphire Frogman, the thousand-dollar titanium idol currently whispering to me from the internet.

If the Tuna fills that lane, several pleasant consequences follow.

First, I stop the collection at eight watches, a number that still resembles discipline rather than pathology.

Second, I avoid introducing a sapphire Frogman that would inevitably start competing with my beloved Frogman GWF-1000, turning the watch box into a small arena of amphibious rivalry.

Third, the Tuna—currently receiving about as much wrist time as a museum artifact—gets to live again.

Fourth, I avoid spending nine hundred dollars on what is essentially a prestige upgrade: a watch whose improvements amount to slightly clearer digits and bragging rights for social media spectators.

Fifth, I avoid paying nearly a thousand dollars for a watch that, if I squint hard enough and tilt my head toward the light like a suspicious jeweler, looks almost identical to the one I already own.

What I’m really saying, ladies and gentlemen, is that I’m searching for an exit ramp.

Not an exit from watches entirely, but an exit from the compulsion to keep expanding the collection as if the next acquisition might finally calm the storm.

Because the truth is obvious. My eight watches already do everything a watch can possibly do. Another one at this point isn’t a tool—it’s an additional weight tied to the ankle of enjoyment.

Another watch becomes an anchor.

Another watch becomes kryptonite.

Another watch dilutes the potency of the ones I already love.

Of course, this is the speech I’m giving myself this morning. Whether I remain faithful to it is another matter entirely. A watch obsessive, after all, is simply a man locked in a polite but relentless argument with himself.

And perhaps that is the broader human condition. The very pursuits that bring us joy—hobbies, ambitions, passions—also contain the seeds of excess. Mishandled, they curdle. What began as pleasure turns into agitation.

These are the thoughts rushing through my brain today, pouring forward like a swollen river after heavy rain.

If it weren’t watches, it would be something else.

That much, I know for certain.

March 16, 2026
The Moral Danger of Divine Cheesecake

Last night I had a dream that unfolded with the logic and extravagance of a Fellini film set on a public beach. I discovered a stray dog wandering along the shoreline, a scruffy creature with the melancholy dignity of someone who had seen too much of the world’s indifference. The dog could speak. His first words were disbelief. He could not imagine that I, a random human loitering by the Pacific, intended to adopt him.

To prove my sincerity—and perhaps to apologize for the miserable hand life had dealt him—I performed what can only be described as an act of culinary sorcery. With no apparent effort, I summoned two desserts out of thin air and placed them on a small café table facing the ocean. One was a mango cheesecake the size of a steering wheel, glowing with tropical radiance. The other was a monumental chocolate cake decorated with extravagant ribbons and shell-like ridges of frosting, the sort of cake that looks less baked than sculpted.

The dog, clearly a creature of refinement, approached the cake with delicate reverence, nibbling with the restraint of a Parisian pastry critic. I told him not to worry—I knew of special utensils designed specifically for dogs who wished to eat cake with dignity. I would run downtown and return in minutes.

That’s when the trouble began.

When I returned to the café table, I found a woman plunging a bakery knife into my cake with the stealth of a pirate raiding a treasure chest. I launched into a lecture about theft and decency. Mid-sermon, another woman attempted a lightning strike on the mango cheesecake, hoping to slice off a piece before the moral police arrived. I drove her off as well.

In that moment it dawned on me: these desserts were not ordinary desserts. They were supernatural artifacts. Something about their beauty radiated outward like perfume, alerting passersby that heaven had briefly opened a bakery on the beach. People could sense it. They were willing to bend their morals for a taste. And I had a darker suspicion—once someone tasted the cakes, the bending of morals might turn into a full collapse.

The dog and I decided the beach was no longer safe for divine pastries. We relocated to the lobby of a nearby hotel, where the two of us quietly devoured the cakes like conspirators protecting a sacred relic. Strangely, the effect on us was the opposite of what I had feared. Each bite seemed to make us kinder, calmer, more decent versions of ourselves.

Between bites, I told the dog he would never be homeless again. He would live with me forever. He thanked me with the solemn gratitude only a talking beach dog can muster.

Then he asked the obvious question: how had I managed to summon cakes of such celestial quality?

I admitted the truth. I had no idea what I had done or how I had done it. But one thing was clear: it was a one-time miracle. The bakery of heaven had closed its doors.

The rest of our lives, the dog and I would have to live on ordinary meals—and the memory of that impossible dessert.

March 16, 2026
The Loneliness Hypothesis: Is Social Isolation Making America Mean? (college essay prompt)
Read “How America Got Mean” by David Brooks and “The Anti-Social Century” by Derek Thompson. Then watch the comedy special Lonely Flowers by Roy Wood Jr..

In Lonely Flowers, Roy Wood Jr. argues that increasing loneliness and social disconnection are contributing to a rise in anger, hostility, and violence in American society. Brooks and Thompson also describe a culture that is becoming more fragmented, isolated, and socially brittle.

Write a 1,000-word argumentative essay that develops a thesis responding to Roy Wood Jr.’s claim. Using the ideas from Brooks and Thompson, argue whether social isolation is a convincing explanation for the rise in cultural hostility and violence. Your essay may support, refute, or complicate Wood’s claim.

Thesis + Mapping Requirement

Your introduction must include a thesis that does two things:
1. Takes a clear position on Wood’s claim about loneliness and violence.
2. Maps the major reasons that will organize your body paragraphs.
Example thesis with mapping

Roy Wood Jr.’s claim that loneliness is fueling violence in America is persuasive because, as David Brooks and Derek Thompson show, the collapse of community institutions, the rise of hyper-individualism, and the retreat into private digital life have produced a society that is increasingly disconnected and emotionally volatile.

In this thesis, the mapping components are:
- collapse of community institutions
- retreat into private digital life
- loss of meaningful language
- loss of intuition to connect with others
Each of those becomes a body paragraph.

Essay Requirements

Your essay should include:

• a clear thesis with mapping components
• analysis of key ideas from Brooks and Thompson
• references to Roy Wood Jr.’s argument in Lonely Flowers
• a counterargument that challenges your thesis
• a rebuttal defending your position
• a concluding paragraph that reflects on what these ideas suggest about modern American culture

Possible directions for your argument

You might argue that:

• loneliness and isolation are making Americans angrier and more volatile
• loneliness explains some hostility but not actual violence
• digital life is replacing real community and increasing resentment
• other forces (economic anxiety, media outrage, politics) are stronger causes of violence
March 15, 2026
Late to the G-Shock Party

Even though I’ve been obsessed with watches for over twenty years, I arrived embarrassingly late to the G-Shock party. I didn’t plan the arrival. It felt more like this: I’m riding in the back seat of an Uber when the driver suddenly pulls up in front of a strange mansion glowing with neon light. The doors swing open. Inside are thousands of loud, jubilant G-Shock devotees who greet me like a long-lost cousin. Champagne appears. Confetti rains down. Someone hands me a microphone and asks for a testimonial.

I have no prepared remarks. But I can tell the truth.

For two decades I was perfectly happy collecting Seiko mechanical divers. They were my tribe. Yet somewhere in the back of my mind a particular watch kept whispering to me: the G-Shock Frogman. I had admired it on and off for over a decade. Amazingly, the same model was still available, so I finally ordered one from Japan. A watch that once would have cost me $400 now demanded $550, which is the sort of price inflation that causes a small twitch in the eyelid.

When the Frogman arrived, something strange happened.

I couldn’t take it off.

The watch felt uncannily right, as if some committee of Japanese engineers had secretly studied my personality and designed a wrist instrument to match it. It was heroic, absurdly tough, and far more accurate than my mechanical divers. Within weeks I stopped wearing the mechanicals altogether. Three of them quietly left the collection. Whether I’m taking a mechanical hiatus or attending their funeral remains unclear.

What I do know is that G-Shock has given my watch hobby a strange second life.

At the moment I own two of them: the Frogman and the GW-7900. Viewers on my YouTube channel insisted the 7900 deserved a proper name. A subscriber named Dave solved the problem immediately. “Call it the Tidemaster,” he said, since the watch tracks tides.

Perfect.

So now I have the Frogman and the Tidemaster. One cost me $550. The other cost $110.

Here’s the truth no luxury marketing department wants to hear: from a purely practical standpoint, the $110 Tidemaster is the better watch. Its numerals are larger, thicker, and darker. The contrast is superior. At night the backlight illuminates big bold digits that practically shout the time. The Frogman, by comparison, requires a small squint and a mild prayer.

In other words, the cheap watch wins the legibility contest.

A third watch is arriving next week: the G-Shock GW-6900. Like the 7900, it currently lacks a proper nickname. The watch has three round indicators above the display, which makes it look like a mildly deranged insect. I considered several possibilities. “Triple Graph” sounds like a geometry exam. “Militaire” sounds like a fragrance sold in an airport duty-free shop. So I’m going with the obvious choice:

The 3-Eyed Monster.

My goal is simple: settle into a stable Three-Watch G-Shock Trifecta. All three watches share the same genetic code—big heroic cases, atomic timekeeping, solar charging, digital displays, and rubber straps. That combination is my personal sweet spot.

Now we arrive at the temptation.

Many of you have suggested I should upgrade to the sapphire-crystal Frogman, a watch that lurks around the $1,000 mark. And believe me, that watch is occupying prime real estate in my brain. But I’d like to present a few rebuttals before I surrender to the credit card.

First, price. The Tidemaster and the 3-Eyed Monster cost about $110 each. Even the Frogman stayed under $600. Part of the joy of G-Shock is that it delivers durability, accuracy, and ridiculous hero aesthetics without the emotional trauma of a four-figure purchase. Once you push a G-Shock toward a thousand dollars, you start undermining the very spirit that makes the watch fun.

Second, technical overkill. The sapphire Frogman is loaded with features I will never use. Yes, the display is slightly more legible than my existing Frogman, but that problem is already solved by the Tidemaster and the 3-Eyed Monster.

Third, rotational anxiety. Two Frogmans would cancel each other out. I doubt I could sell my current Frogman—it has already fused itself to my identity like a stubborn barnacle.

Fourth, and perhaps most decisive, is age. If I were in my thirties or forties, building a large G-Shock collection might make sense. But I’ll be turning sixty-five this year. I don’t need a museum of watches. Between four Seiko mechanical divers, a quartz Seiko Tuna, and my three G-Shocks, I already have more watches than any reasonable human requires.

In fact, I could easily imagine a future where I own nothing but the three G-Shocks and feel perfectly content.

So there you have it.

Will temptation vanish completely? Of course not. Tonight I may dream about the sapphire Frogman. In a moment of midnight weakness I might even sleep-walk to my computer and hover over the Buy Now button.

But I like to believe that the reasonable part of my brain will prevail over the dopamine addict who lives next door.

At least that’s the story I’m telling myself.

March 14, 2026