Watches

I guess my point was that in this day and age mechanical watches are in fact primarily jewellery, as they don't justify their existence as time pieces.

The average mechanical might drift 5-15 secs per day and have a max power reserve of 20-80 hours.

At least once per week you need to be on top of it, adjusting it against an actually accurate clock if you want to not be late at appointments (if you're in fact using it as your primary time keeper).

Do you need to know day and date? That's two pretty expensive complications - and with those you'll need to also be adjusting it at the end of every other month as it doesn't know the month or the year.

A $50 GShock will drift 15secs per year or less and might require a battery change every 10 years and have 5 complications the mechanical would only dream of. For an extra $20 purchase price it will automatically sync with atomic clocks every night and charge in the sun - you'll never have to worry about power or inaccuracy ever again.

A mechanical watch you need to baby: shock, drop, humidity, magnetic fields, the weather, all will cause issues. Hell, even adjusting day-date complications at the wrong time might grind the gears.

You need to service it by an expert every 3-5 years at a significant cost.

You drop the Casio from an airplane and it will survive fine. Service? I'll see you in a decade for a battery change at $10.

If the argument is time-keeping this is like riding a horse and buggy to go to a meeting when you could do a video call instead.

So why do we choose to spend all that money on them?

It's pure indulgence and social signalling (look at what I can afford // see what this says about me) - aka: jewellery.

If we buy really expensive or rare ones we hope they'll go up in price in the future, but probably won't - aka: jewellery.

We combine them with different straps and some of us have collections of different ones for different occasions or moods - you guessed it: jewellery.

Their utility of keeping time very, very expensively and rather badly by modern standards is simply the thin veneer of logic we need to justify the rest of the cost.

I submit that instead we should admit that we buy them as an act of pure self love.

For the same reason we might buy and display a nice piece of art. It needs cleaning, it needs to be protected and sometimes we choose to display it in a prominent place.

We can see a million pieces of art on our phone for free - but many of us still buy them and display them in our home or work.

Because we're social creatures and owning nice things that we can admire both on our own and others can admire with us and about our choices makes us feel good, and that's it.