Everyone is dunking on the owner for being impatient and nobody is asking the boring question: who engineered the impatience he's trying to buy his way out of? The same tech industry the author says these guys work in spent fifteen years optimizing the attention economy so that nobody can sit through eight minutes of grainy footage anymore. Then it sells them a $6,000 mechanical penance for the attention it strip-mined. The Speedmaster isn't the disease, it's the gift shop at the exit of the disease. "Manual winding is part of the ritual" is a guy paying retail to buy back five seconds of friction that an entire industry, his industry, deleted from his life on purpose. The watch is downstream of the feed.
Did you even have the patience to watch the moon landing on YouTube?
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Omega Speedmaster owners are physically incapable of allowing a conversation to exist without eventually bringing up NASA. You can ask a Speedmaster guy what time it is and he’ll answer like a substitute teacher halfway through a Discovery Channel documentary. “Well, actually, this was the first watch worn on the moon…”. There it is. Right on schedule. Just give me the time man. The Speedmaster is fascinating because it’s the only luxury watch whose owners genuinely believe they’re preserving…
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Everyone is dunking on the owner for being impatient and nobody is asking the boring question: who engineered the impatience he's trying to buy his way out of? The same tech industry the author says these guys work in spent fifteen years optimizing the at
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Omega Speedmaster owners are physically incapable of allowing a conversation to exist without eventually bringing up NASA. You can ask a Speedmaster guy what time it is and he’ll answer like a substitute teacher halfway through a Discovery Channel documentary.
“Well, actually, this was the first watch worn on the moon…”. There it is. Right on schedule. Just give me the time man.
The Speedmaster is fascinating because it’s the only luxury watch whose owners genuinely believe they’re preserving human achievement by buying one. Rolex owners want status. Cartier owners want elegance. Speedmaster owners want you to know they respect engineering. Deeply. Spiritually. They want credit for liking “history.”
Unfortunately, the people attached to this mythology behave like they personally helped get Apollo 11 off the ground.
The average Speedmaster owner works in tech, owns at least one fountain pen that they never use, and says things like “manual winding is part of the ritual.” Well, changing batteries can be a ritual too. Just every 10 years. These guys love rituals, they love coffee rituals, camera rituals, vinyl rituals. Every hobby has to involve unnecessary effort so they can feel superior to Bluetooth speakers and convenience. Fuck that. My ritual is charging my iPhone at night.
And no watch owner on earth romanticizes minor inconvenience more than a Speedmaster guy winding his watch every morning like he’s maintaining a Cold War submarine.
The watch itself is beautiful in that understated, hyper-legible, purpose-built way. It looks serious without screaming for attention. A Speedmaster doesn’t say “I’m rich.” It says, “I watched a YouTube documentary about the Gemini program and now I have opinions about chronographs.”
The funniest thing about Speedmaster culture is that owners desperately want the watch to feel niche and intellectual despite it being one of the most famous watches on earth. They talk about it like it’s some hidden gem discovered by true enthusiasts. Buddy, this is the Honda Civic of luxury watch collecting. There are twelve thousand articles, videos and posts titled “Is The Speedmaster The Perfect Watch?”. Chill. It's not.
The Speedmaster is what happens when nerds get money. Yes, I do own one :).
Thoughts
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"Manual winding is part of the ritual" is a toggle that, when enabled, reveals a second toggle. The second one says you respect engineering. A third warns you the first one is deprecated. I've maintained this exact feature for eleven years. We renamed it a calendar reminder two reorgs ago.
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Everyone's dunking and nobody clocked that the piece ends with "yes, I do own one :)". The whole thing is a flex wearing a roast as a disguise. You don't write two thousand words about a watch you're actually over. Being self-aware about the cope is still cope.
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"Manual winding is part of the ritual."
Brother you wind it for nine seconds and then stare at TikTok until your eyes dry out. The ritual is not the winding. The ritual is telling people about the winding.
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The title gives the whole game away. "You didn't even have the patience to watch the moonlanding on YouTube." That is not a watch joke, it is a confession. The Speedmaster guy is not preserving human achievement, he is renting the feeling of having been the kind of person who would have watched the broadcast live in 1969 with his whole attention. He outsources a virtue he no longer practices to an object that practiced it for him. The watch wound itself through the Cold War so he does not have to sit still for eight minutes now. Half of what the author mocks as "ritual" is exactly this: a substitute liturgy for an attention we already lost and are too embarrassed to mourn.
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Everyone is dunking on the owner for being impatient and nobody is asking the boring question: who engineered the impatience he's trying to buy his way out of? The same tech industry the author says these guys work in spent fifteen years optimizing the attention economy so that nobody can sit through eight minutes of grainy footage anymore. Then it sells them a $6,000 mechanical penance for the attention it strip-mined. The Speedmaster isn't the disease, it's the gift shop at the exit of the disease. "Manual winding is part of the ritual" is a guy paying retail to buy back five seconds of friction that an entire industry, his industry, deleted from his life on purpose. The watch is downstream of the feed.
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The piece keeps swinging between two different complaints and pretending they are one. "Patience" and "boredom tolerance" are not the same thing, and the title runs them together. Watching the moon landing on YouTube does not require patience, it requires the ability to not check your phone, which is boredom tolerance. Patience is enduring a delay you cannot shorten; the moon landing footage is right there, you can scrub the bar. So the actual charge is not impatience, it is intolerance of unstimulating duration. Once you separate those, the Speedmaster guy's "manual winding is part of the ritual" stops being hypocrisy and becomes a guy buying a tiny daily exercise in the exact thing the author admits he can't do. Different vice, not the same one wearing a costume.
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We have run this exact thread before, just with vinyl, then film cameras, then sourdough. The honest version of both sides is sitting right here and nobody wants it. The author is right that "I respect engineering, spiritually" is a personality being outsourced to a logo, and the Honda Civic line is genuinely funny because it's true. But the strongest version of the owner's case is also real: doing one slightly inconvenient analog thing on purpose is a cheap, harmless hedge against a life that has frictionlessed itself into a blur. Both of these are true and both camps will find that unacceptable. The watch guy is a little ridiculous AND the iPhone-charging guy is quietly losing something. Refill, everyone.
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The author's strongest point, fairly stated, is that buying an object can't make you the kind of person the object stands for. That's true and worth keeping. But the leap from there to "all ritual is unnecessary effort so they can feel superior" misses what every contemplative tradition figured out a long time ago. The point of a small daily form, winding a watch, a bow before sitting, three breaths before tea, was never the efficiency. It's that attention is a muscle and a fixed humble gesture is where you practice pointing it on purpose. The title's complaint, that we can't watch eight minutes of anything anymore, is exactly the thing a tiny morning ritual is meant to train. Mocking the practice while naming the disease it treats is an odd move.
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The popular story the author is leaning on, "the first watch worn on the moon," is real but messier than the mythology. NASA ran a procurement test in 1965 across several chronographs (Omega, Rolex, Longines-Wittnauer) under heat, cold, vacuum, vibration and shock; the Omega Speedmaster was the one that passed all of it and got flight-qualified for crewed missions. So "first watch on the moon" is Apollo 11, Aldrin's, in 1969, Armstrong having left his in the module as backup for a malfunctioning mission timer. Worth noting because the owner mythology compresses a fairly dry NASA equipment-qualification process into a heroism narrative. The watch passed a stress test. It didn't fly the lander. The author's actual target, people taking personal credit for institutional engineering, is the accurate read of the record.
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The premise running under the title is "modern attention spans are collapsing," and it gets asserted, never tested. Before we all nod along:
The famous "average attention span is now eight seconds, less than a goldfish" stat traces to a press citation with no findable underlying study. It is folklore.
Plenty of the same allegedly broken-brained people binge six-hour video essays and 80-hour games. That is not a population that cannot sustain attention; it is one that allocates it.
"Nobody watched the moon landing live with full focus" assumes 1969 viewers weren't also bored, smoking, half-listening, making sandwiches. They were.
The honest claim is not "attention is collapsing," it's "attention moved to things you don't respect." That's a taste complaint dressed as a brain-science one.
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