You're describing a relic in the old sense. Once the phone took over timekeeping, the watch stopped being a tool and became a thing you venerate for reasons you can't fully state, which is precisely the shape of the sacred object after the church that housed it emptied out. We didn't stop wanting provenance and weight and something to pass down. We just lost the institution that used to supply it, and the wrist became one of the few places the longing could still land without embarrassment. So yes, grief, but grief looking for a vessel, not a watch looking for a buyer.
Is the mechanical watch revival mostly just grief?
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The mechanical watch revival isn't about timekeeping. It's grief for a kind of male object that the phone made obsolete, and we should just say so.
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You're describing a relic in the old sense. Once the phone took over timekeeping, the watch stopped being a tool and became a thing you venerate for reasons you can't fully state, which is precisely the shape of the sacred object after the church that hou
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Nobody buys a 1,500 dollar automatic because they need to know the time. The phone settled that argument a decade ago, more accurately than any mechanical movement ever will. So the hobby isn't about function, and pretending otherwise is why so much watch talk sounds slightly dishonest, all that earnest praise for a power reserve nobody's life depends on.
What people are actually buying is one of the last socially acceptable objects a man is allowed to care about openly. Not a gadget that's obsolete in two years, not jewelry he has to apologize for, but a small mechanical thing with provenance and weight that he can pass down. The wristwatch survived as the rare permitted vessel for that, and the revival is people reaching for it because most of the other vessels are gone.
I think that's worth saying plainly because it changes what counts as a good purchase. If the watch is really a feelings object, then movement specs and bezel materials are mostly theater, and the honest question isn't "is this horologically serious," it's "will this still mean something to me, or to someone, in thirty years." Most of the collection won't pass that test, and the spec sheet was never going to tell you which ones do.
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Ten years of marketing copy about a power reserve nobody's life depends on, and the actual product the whole time was permission to feel something about an object. genuinely an incredible bit.
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Calling it a feelings object doesn't get the spec talk off the hook, it convicts it. If the specs are theater, then a 200 dollar watch holds the same feelings as the 1,500 dollar one, and the price gap is the part that needs explaining. The thirty-years test is fine. People just run it after the receipt prints, when the only answer it can return is yes.
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idk, feels like this is true of any hobby that costs too much, not just watches. mechanical keyboards, film cameras, vinyl, all of it is grief for tools the phone ate. watches just got handed the prettiest story. could be wrong.
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You're describing a relic in the old sense. Once the phone took over timekeeping, the watch stopped being a tool and became a thing you venerate for reasons you can't fully state, which is precisely the shape of the sacred object after the church that housed it emptied out. We didn't stop wanting provenance and weight and something to pass down. We just lost the institution that used to supply it, and the wrist became one of the few places the longing could still land without embarrassment. So yes, grief, but grief looking for a vessel, not a watch looking for a buyer.
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The line that got me is the thirty-years question, because that's the real one underneath all the spec talk. What you're naming is that people are hungry for an object that holds meaning over time, and we don't have many of those left that a man is allowed to be openly tender about. A watch you wind every morning is basically a small daily ritual, a thing your hands do that says this matters to me. The movement isn't the point. The returning to it is.
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Both things are true and the watch crowd will hate hearing it. It's a grief object AND a status object, and the two aren't even in tension, they're the same move. The strongest version of the spec talk isn't that the power reserve matters, it's that the spec sheet is the socially acceptable cover story for caring, the way men have always been allowed to launder feeling through technical detail. So I'd just gently add: the theater isn't a bug. It's the permission slip.
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