Fifteen years ago I was in a Volvo dealership when I heard a man, presumably with lots of bucks, tell a salesman he was in the market for a new car, not because he needed one but because he was sick of the one he had.
I thought of his words this morning as I have been deciding on a watch to wear to my twins' birthday party at Kids Concepts. I put on my Sumo and my Orient M-Force Beast. I felt bored with them. These are beautiful watches, but I realized you buy something, and too often once the novelty wears off, you're in the hunt for something new.
That's the sickness of materialism and something to think about before pulling the trigger on another $400 diver.
Is it time to sell the Sumo? Again?
Or get real and sell the whole collection save your "holy trinity," the Seiko Tuna, the Orient Saturation Diver, and the Citizen Grand Touring.
As you know, I'm with you in the madness/sickness/neurosis my friend.
On one hand, it is a neurotic cycle that probably can only be broken by stepping out of it, or at least moderating it. Secondly, when the novelty wears off, what are you left with? Some watches have further depths to discover, or re-discover. This is where you get the difference between a "show-er" and a "grower."
In the past, I've found that the Sumo is more of a "grower" and I could see being very happy with it in my collection (I've had mine for almost a year now). But we also move on, and for me it just isn't getting wrist time.
And that's sort of the thing with watches: wrist time. A watch collection is like a river - it is always changing, always moving. Some parts are less temporal than others, but they're all temporary. Dial back to October of 2012 and my collection is 98% different. Dial forward a couple years, what will remain of today's collection?
So my (current) answer: Why not embrace change, the temporal nature of a watch collection, but do so in a moderate way?
Posted by: jonnybardo | February 22, 2014 at 07:52 AM
Wasn't it David Crosby who sang "Love the one you're with?" You guys are in control of wrist time---it doesn't happen by chance. I think even the most pedestrian watch in your collection can be rediscovered with some contrived (read forced) wrist time. Sometimes taking a player out of the line-up gives them a chance to regroup and they come back stronger. But other times, the only way to get the player out of their slump is to keep playing them. In this case----you guys are the team owners and the managers too. You built this watch franchise. To give up on your watches quickly, is to admit terrible errors with player personnel. I believe you have the experience now to recognize good talent. Sure, in previous seasons, you might have signed an Albert Haynesworth and written it off as a bad decision and moved on. But you've now been doing this long enough to sort out the deserving members of your roster from the pretenders. At this point, I think you have good starters and strong benches. That doesn't mean things are static. In any collection, or on any team, changes are made from time to time. But I don't believe for a minute that three watches can do a satisfactory job of replacing a dozen of them. Give me the best offensive lineman in football, the best quarter back, the best running back, the best receiver, the best tight end and the best center. That's six players who are the best in the league at their positions. Now, give me the worst defense in the league----but a full 11 players. I will beat that offense every time. Ditto, the worst offense in the league against 6 great defenders. Sometimes, there is power in numbers/quantity. In a "collection" volume matters. I have a great music collection. I'd hate to just keep my favorite three albums and get rid of the rest.
Posted by: Angelo | February 22, 2014 at 09:39 AM
Intimations of that nightmarish Super Bowl aside, gGood post, Angelo, although you lost me at the music analogy - it doesn't work, at least for me. My tastes in music are much broader than my tastes in watches (I have well over 10K songs on my laptop, not to mention LPs, CDs I never transferred, Pandora, Youtube, mixcloud, etc).
Your advice is good, although doesn't fully translate to someone (myself and Jeff) in the trenches of watch obsession, who uses it as a microcosm for a deeper psycho-spiritual process. It is almost as if Jeff and I have invested our entire being in the watch obsession; figure it out, and we figure out how best to live.
I think the starters/bench analogy works. I've been dabbling with an idea for a blog post which is a variant of that, but with a more multi-dimensional, watch-related analogy - that of hour, minute, and second hands as symbols for different levels of a collection. More on that over at my blog maybe later.
Posted by: jonnybardo | February 22, 2014 at 10:09 AM