- Watch Rotation Anxiety: You have a dozen or so watches all screaming for wrist time, but you have to choose one based on mood, clothing, occasion, work, play, etc. You tell yourself how lucky you are to have such an amazing collection but you find yourself in despair over trying to choose and after ten or so watch switches you feel compelled to walk to your book shelf and pick up your well-worn copy of Barry Schwarz's The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less.
- Love-Neglect Syndrome: You've been neglecting one of your favorites for too long. How can this be? Three months have passed since you've worn your Seiko Golgo, the "grail" you said you just had to have. It's time to give it some "love." You pull it out of the box and almost pet it as if it were a neglected puppy and you wonder if you're wearing the watch because of love or guilt. You begin to wonder if your watch hobby is a source of joy or toxicity or both.
- Kindling the Fire Syndrome: Jonny, a reader of this blog, explained to me, correctly, that you can will yourself to like a watch by wearing it. The watch fuses with your brain synapses and you bond with it. Not wearing a watch can have the opposite effect. Your affections for it will atrophy. To experience a watch you spent your good money on, you must discpline yourself to wear it even if you don't feel compelled to do so. Otherwise, you risk selling it and then seeing someone wearing it on TV and saying, "My God, what an incredible watch! Why did I ever sell it!" Upon which you re-buy the damn thing.
- Watch Affair: Your buying watches behind your wife's back because you don't want her to scold you for spending so much damn money all the time. You receive the box but don't open it until she's gone. If she asks you what's in the box, you shrug as if it's something inconsequential.
- Bling Relapse: You started your watch obsession with oversized, cheap fashion watches that belong on the wrists of nefarious characters slithering down the Las Vegas strip. As your education of the watch world becomes more advanced, your tastes change for classier, functional, "real" watches, such as lume tool divers. But these classier watches don't get as much attention as your Las Vegas timepieces and wanting to regain those old glory days you find yourself buying those watches that you had sworn were a curse and an embarrassment to your existence.
- Lumiholic: Quite simply, you are obssessed with professional-grade luminosity on the hands and indices of your dial and have a seething contempt for low-lume and non-lume watches, which strike you as utterly fraudulent.
- Watch Overload: You're buying so many watches and receiving so many in the mail in the same time period that your brain is overloaded and you can't even absorb the watch's aesthetic qualities. You can't tell if you like these newly acquired timepieces of if they bore you. The fact is your frosted brain has become numbed from buying and looking at too many watches.
- Holy Grail Syndrome: You find a grail and convince yourself that this grail will cure you of your sickness but find that one grail is replaced by another and another and another. Feelings of helplessness, shame, and self-loathing are common.
- Climbing the Ladder: Your tastes in watches become more and more refined so that $300 watches are replaced by $700 watches, which are replaced by $1,200 watches and then you reach a point in which you are convinced that it is only watches that cost $5,000 or more which will satisfy your watch rapacity.
- Watch Perception Freakout: There's a watch in your collection that you've neglected. It no longer "sings on your wrist," but you're innocently watching television and see an actor wearing "your watch," the one you've neglected the last six months. The perception of this watch on an actor on the TV set is radically different than the experience of you wearing the same watch and this causes you to take the watch out of its box and look at it with newfound wonder.
- Purging to Binge: Your collection has topped fifty and instead of wallowing in the glory of your lavish collection, you feel dyspeptic and trending toward crapulence. This bloated feeling can only be alleviated by purging your collection, going through the arduous process of selling the bulk of your watches on eBay or Watch Recon. As your collection goes down to a manageable ten, your coveting three more watches and realize trying to stave off your watch collection is like trying to cut off a head from the multi-headed Lernaean Hydra. In fact, you've been purging your collection to justify buying even more expensive watches. You wonder if there are meetings for diseased people like yourself, havens of emotional support as people of your ilk gather to share such tales of woe and despair.
Nice list. I think I've found myself experiencing every single one on that list to varying degrees.
Posted by: jonnybardo | December 20, 2013 at 09:41 PM
RE: #10: Didn't it happen in high school----guy and girl dating----guy decided he wanted to "branch off" and date others----broke up with girl---girl started dating new guy----and was suddenly desirable again to the guy who broke up with her? Also, girl in high school looked "average" and was never really noticed much. Guy asks her out and starts dating her----and suddenly, she's "hot" for some reason, even though she's the same girl she's always been. Yes, seeing that watch on someone else gives it a whole new look, a whole new level of "must have."
Posted by: Angelo | December 21, 2013 at 04:50 AM
Here's an article about cleaning watches.
http://wornandwound.com/2013/12/16/watch-curmudgeon-watches-hygienically-challenged/
Posted by: Gary | December 21, 2013 at 10:42 AM
At least watches are small and fairly easy to conceal from one's spouse--unlike radios ;-)
Posted by: Keith Beesley | December 22, 2013 at 01:53 AM
I guess it might be necessary to conceal the credit card bills as well, especially as the frequency of purchases or cost per purchase rises.
Posted by: Gary | December 22, 2013 at 01:23 PM