Tale of Two Watches
An experiment in time travel
To hear the related 5-minute audio file that I uploaded today as my Morning Journal flash briefing for Alexa devices, please click on the play button:
Simplify, Simplify?
For the past few days, I have been wearing a watch that only tells time.
My Apple Watch Series 10 stays on its charger except for nighttime, when I rely on it to tell me how tired to be as I wake up.
During the day, I am wearing a 27-jewel timepiece with Roman numerals for the hours. Technically, it also tells the day of the week and date of the month. But those two dials are too small for me to read without a magnifying glass.
A third dial shows whether it’s dark or light out, via a 24-hour clock. That’s not useful, because the watch face is not lit. At night I can’t see it.
Thoreau would perhaps approve of my experiment. In Walden he recommended one meal a day instead of three, selected from a menu of five choices instead of 100.
An Apple Watch has access to more than 50,000 apps. My Stauer Magnificat II timepiece has zero.
I haven’t read Walden in more than 40 years, and I hadn’t planned to downsize my watch technology. I love my Apple Watch.
I use it for scanning my boarding pass at the airport, buying lattés with Apple Pay, bonging a mindfulness alert 15 minutes after every hour, creating reminders when I raise my wrist during a bike ride, unlocking the Tesla when I’ve left my phone in the house, recording every pickleball workout, taking photos, and checking the weather and my calendar.
What led to my experiment was a full-page ad on the back cover of The Week magazine. The headline read, “Upper Class Just Got Lower Priced: Finally, luxury built for value—not for false status.”
The photo made the Stauer watch look like something out of Vanity Fair on the wrist of Brad Pitt. The price? $99 plus shipping—$400 less than my Apple Watch Series 10.
I didn’t have a plan for what I would do with the Magnificat II, but my urge to purchase it was strong. I didn’t know why.
As I’ve thought about it this week, I realize that my tech arsenal has been downsized in two other ways recently. One was the decision to sell my seldom-used Apple Vision Pro on eBay. The other was the looming demise of my beloved Humane AI Pin.
It may be that I am clearing the decks in preparation for Geek Woodstock next month in Austin, where I will join 30,000 other gadget lovers at South By Southwest Interactive.
Or it may be that my sitting practice is dialing me back into the present moment.
Whatever the reason, I smiled at myself today as I glanced at the Magnificat II for a look at the weather temp. There was nothing on my wrist but the time, measured out in marks invented two millennia ago.
I’l give the last words to Thoreau:
Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!