What a Watch Is For

by Christopher Spencer

There was a time when leaving the house without a watch felt a little like leaving without shoes. Before the phone in our pocket became a clock, map, camera, compass, calendar and nearly everything else, a watch had a straightforward job. It told us the time. I still wear one most days, although I no longer pretend that is the reason.

My everyday watch is a TAG Heuer 6000 in gold and steel that I bought roughly thirty years ago. I wanted a watch substantial enough for everyday wear and capable enough to take scuba diving. It has since been underwater with me throughout Mexico and the Caribbean, on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, in Thailand, and in a handful of American lakes considerably less glamorous than any of those places. It has some scratches. About fifteen years ago I had the minor ones buffed out. I have never believed that every mark on a possession needs to be preserved as evidence of character. Sometimes a scratch is just a scratch.

The TAG is still my dive watch. That surprises me a little when I think about it. Diving technology has changed enormously since I bought it, and if I had to replace it tomorrow I would probably choose something modern and more technologically capable. I own an Apple Watch for modern day functions like hiking data and sleep monitoring. I am not resisting technology out of nostalgia. The old TAG simply keeps working, so I keep wearing it.

It also feels right on my wrist. I am a large man, built more like a linebacker than a jockey, and small watches have always looked a little lost on me. I like the TAG's size and weight. After three decades, I know the feel of it without thinking about it. More than that, putting it on can bring back something of the places where I have worn it. It has become a reminder of dives made years ago, even while remaining an object I still use today.

That is not, however, the whole story of watches and me.

When I was younger, what I wore mattered to me for reasons I understand better now than I did then. I grew up in a fortunate family, but I was also an insecure kid living under the considerable presence of a very aggressive, Type A father. I had been happy growing up in Dallas before my father decided we were moving full-time to the family ranch. The ranch had long been our weekend retreat, but in the 1980s it became a corporate operation within the family business, and suddenly it became home.

The move changed my world. My school and friends had been in Dallas. Now I was the new kid in a small rural community where I felt conspicuously different, and being the son of the man who had become the largest employer in the county did not exactly make blending in easier.

Eventually I got my driver's license, and money provided a solution of sorts. I had sports cars people wanted to ride in. I could pay for nights out and parties. I could wear the clothes, watches and accessories that announced, before I said anything, that I came from the family everyone knew.

I liked being the richest kid in town.

That is not particularly flattering to admit, but it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. For a while, it became part of my identity. Looking back, I can also see how much insecurity was hiding underneath it. Expensive clothes and accessories became a kind of armor. They gave me control over the first impression. If someone did not like me, I could at least make certain they understood that I was successful, privileged and important. Money could attract people, and I was willing to spend it to keep them around.

The trouble with armor is that it can prevent people from getting very close.

I did not arrive at that conclusion all at once. Travel helped.

When I began traveling internationally without my family, I discovered something liberating: nobody knew who I was. They did not know my father. They did not know what our family owned, how many people the company employed, what car I drove at home or what position we occupied in our Texas community. Outside that bubble, none of it bought me much of anything that mattered.

Travel also made conspicuous displays of wealth seem less clever. In unfamiliar places, an expensive watch or obviously costly wardrobe could make you a target rather than an object of admiration. Practicality encouraged restraint. But something else was happening at the same time. I was becoming more interested in the people I met than in making sure they were impressed by me.

I began to understand how fortunate my life in America had been, but also how narrow the view from inside that fortunate bubble could become. I wanted conversations with people whose lives looked nothing like mine. I wanted to understand how they lived, what they cared about and what we might have in common. The less energy I spent establishing my position, the easier those conversations became.

I did not stop liking good things.

That distinction matters to me. Maturity did not suddenly turn me into someone who believes quality, style or beautiful objects are frivolous. I still own the TAG. I have a Cartier that spends most of its life safely put away, along with a U-Boat and a Fendi that come out for particular occasions. I still care whether a watch looks right with what I am wearing. I still appreciate the design, weight and craftsmanship of a well-made object.

What changed was my need for the object to explain me to somebody else.

Perhaps that is why watches are more interesting now that we no longer really need them.

For most of their history, wristwatches had an obvious purpose. They put the time where you could see it. Today, nearly everyone carries a device more accurate than the finest mechanical watch ever made. If knowing the time were the only objective, the wristwatch would be approaching irrelevance.

Instead, we keep wearing them.

Some people collect watches because they admire mechanical engineering. Some appreciate design or history. Others enjoy what a particular brand communicates. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that. A watch has always been both practical object and personal ornament, and pretending otherwise requires ignoring a century of men choosing one watch over another when both told the same time.

But I have come to think that the best possessions eventually stop being about what they tell strangers.

My TAG once told me when it was time to surface. At another point in my life, a watch could help tell a room something about the man wearing it. Today, the phone in my pocket can tell me the time, and the Apple Watch can do things the TAG could never have imagined.

Yet most mornings, when I decide to wear a watch, I still reach for the old 6000.

It is not because I think everyone will recognize it. I suspect most people will not. It is not because it is the most technologically capable watch I own. It plainly is not. And I do not keep it pristine in a drawer, protected from the life it was supposedly built to accompany.

I wear it because it fits. Because I like the weight of it. Because it has worked for thirty years. Because it has been beneath oceans with me and returned home every time.

If it finally failed beyond repair, I would probably buy a modern dive watch rather than search for another thirty-year-old TAG. Tools should still be allowed to be tools. But unless I manage to destroy this one, I see no reason to retire it.

Maybe that is what a watch is for now.

Not merely to tell us what time it is, and certainly not to tell everyone else who we are.

Sometimes it is enough for an old thing on your wrist to remind you where you have been.