A while back I went back to wearing an analogue wristwatch. Here’s how wearing a simple analogue watch improved my life, and made things a little quieter and more peaceful.
The Smartwatch
I used to have a Fitbit. I loved it, but it was demanding in the same way a dog, a Tamagotchi or a small child is demanding. Every message, email, text and reminder from my phone would buzz on my Fitbit, prompting me to check my phone in case someone had died or something. My mobile phone itself was a further rabbit hole of alerts, notifications and social media apps, so I found myself fighting a “War of Attention” on two fronts.
First off, the Fitbit alerts were distracting. I turned them off, but even then I felt as if the thing was watching and monitoring me. Not in some dystopian 1984-ish manner where my location and vital signs were being sent back to Illuminati HQ, it was more that the monitoring of my steps and heart rate and hydration felt a little intrusive and prescriptive, subtly compelling me to reshape my daily life to fit into an idealistic third-party framework.
So I decided to get rid of Fitbit and its little screen of shame, reminding me of how few steps I’d taken and how much water I still needed to drink. I do still love it, and appreciate its functionality insofar as I’m sometimes curious about my resting heart rate while exercising, but it’s in a drawer in my bedside cabinet until I can find a new home for it.
After the Smartwatch
But then, after ditching the Fitbit I found that I was checking my phone all the time to see what the time was. I don’t have the supernatural ability to estimate the time to the nearest 5 minutes like some people I know, so I had to check my phone. However this felt a little like waking a baby: various apps on the mobile phone with little numbers on them glaring at me with the number of unknown, unread messages.
Even if I didn’t check Messenger, Facebook and the others, the mere presence of those small red numbers sitting in the corners of their icons would sit at the edge of my awareness, bothering me until I caved in, and went to check the app that was crying the loudest.
So using my phone to tell the time was a rabbit hole I wanted to avoid. Ideally I’d be able to go about my daily business and only ever pick up my phone when I intentionally and specifically wanted to use a phone-only function.
Why not just get an analogue watch?
I had a lightbulb-moment: why not (bear with me here) get a watch that just tells the time? Like the kinds of watches we’ve had since the early 20th century?
I did so, and I haven’t looked back.
On Roman Numerals
I chose a Bear Essentials wooden watch from the Botanica range. It is a handsome watch with dark grey face, and Roman numerals. I like Roman numerals on a timepiece. As I child, I remember wondering why my grandparents’ clock had mysterious letters instead of the numbers we had at school. From that point on, numbers used for time always felt stately and exotic to me, and Roman numerals had a timeless, authoritative quality.
It’s the same with dates: I used to like the way that at the very end credits of a programme on BBC 1 late at night there would be a long string of Roman numerals for the year, e.g. MCMLXXXIV. There was something very satisfying about them, but back at school I was grateful that I never had to use them for things like long multiplication. How the Romans performed arithmetic is a mystery to me: our base-10 Arabic numerals are far more well suited to multiplication and addition, the two most basic operations in the field of real numbers. But that’s another rabbit-hole for another day.
What happened
Since wearing an analogue watch and relegating my phone to my bag/pocket, life has become quieter and more sedate. There are no alerts bothering me and my phone remains sitting in my rucksack or jacket pocket most of the time.
My watch doesn’t bother me or intrude upon my life in any way. It does not count my steps or shame me for not hydrating myself enough, or give me alarming statistics about my heart rate. It just sits there dutifully performing its single function: marking the passage of time. And it does so without the battery running out after two days. In fact, the battery will run for years without my having to replace it. Like the best devices, it has one job, and it does it well.
My watch is quiet, and it marks the passage of time with a reassuring ‘tick tick tick’. Sometimes in quieter moments, I’ve sat and listened, mindfully enjoying the time between each ‘tick’. I have found that a lot can happen in a second: a bird call, a couple of words of conversation, a bolt of lightning during a thunderstorm. They can be rpecious moments.
An unexpected social effect
This has had an interesting social effect when I’m at large. I do not have my phone out when meeting with friends, and have been able to maintain a more focussed presence when socialising. If I need to know the time, a glance at my wrist will do
Now the only time I ever bother taking my phone out of my pocket is when I specifically want to use it to send or check for a message. Perhaps while waiting for a friend at a café I may want to send one, or even make a call, but that’s about it. Now it rarely leaves my jacket pocket when I’m out and about.
What watch I got
Bear Essentials aren’t paying me for this post, and I’m not receiving any payment for this post/plug or whatever you want to call it. My intention here was really just to describe how having a good analogue watch can improve one’s quality of life (although they did send me a replacement strap when mine broke after wearing it constantly for a few months). Still, I love it to bits, so wanted to share it with you. The watch I bought was this one, the Botanica “Ivy”, 42mm, with a Navy vegan strap:
It feels light on the wrist, being as it is made of wood. I like wooden things, and being made of wood this watch has intriguing unique natural textures. People often ask me where I got it. Personally I like it because it has a natural charm to it, and an uncomplicated* simplicity. Just go easy on the vegan strap (and order a spare) if you go for that option.
If you need a replacement strap, you can buy one from their “Spares and Repairs” page (which does not appear in the main site navigation, I had to dig around in the robots.txt file and the sitemap to find it) here: https://www.bear-essentials.com/collections/spares-repairs/products/watch-straps?variant=37525792850092
*Pardon the pun