Time Made Tangible: Why Watches Are the Last Intimate Machine

Yesterday, I wandered through the grand halls of Watches & Wonders in Geneva, surrounded by the rhythmic hum of horological masterpieces. The event, often dubbed the “Super Bowl" of the watch industry, showcased luxurious new releases from top-tier brands like Rolex, Vacheron Constantin, and Patek Philippe. ​

The atmosphere was electric, with enthusiasts and collectors alike marveling at the intricate designs and innovations. Among the highlights was the Rolex Land-Dweller, a vintage-inspired model featuring a unique honeycomb dial design. Vacheron Constantin unveiled the Les Cabinotiers Solaria Ultra Grand Complication - La Première, touted as the most complex wristwatch ever made with 1,521 components (though my personal favourite from all the watch drops are the Cartier Tank à Guichets and every Jaeger-LeCoultre Reversos. As well as the Oyster Perpetual with the Lavender Dial. Can you tell purple is my signature colour?) Yet, amidst the opulence, I found myself reflecting on the personal significance of these timepieces. My parents have a tradition: they collect watches to commemorate life's milestones. Each watch in their collection tells a story, marking moments of achievement, love, and growth.​

The Watch as a Personal Chronicle

A watch doesn’t just tell the time; it listens to it. Quietly. Steadily. As if it were keeping a secret it promised never to repeat. Unlike a phone, which blares and buzzes and begs to be touched, a watch simply exists alongside you — an accomplice strapped to the wrist, observant but never invasive.

Mine has watched me cry in airport terminals and oversleep through morning meetings. It’s counted every second I’ve spent waiting for a message that never came and measured the tempo of a laugh I didn’t know I still had in me. It’s there for the in-between: the mundane, the miraculous, the minutes that fall between our idea of a life and the one we're actually living.

My parents never sat me down and said, “Time matters.” But I learnt it from the way people gave each other watches. One for graduating med school. One for the business finally breaking even. One after a surgery that almost wasn’t survived. Their wrists didn’t shimmer with status, they shimmered with story. And as a child, I didn’t know the words for that kind of sentimentality. But I knew, instinctively, that those pieces weren’t worn — they were remembered.

There’s a kind of romance in that, not the sweep-you-off-your-feet variety, but something older and quieter. The romance of reliability. The daily rhythm. The companionship of a thing that will outlast every trend in your wardrobe and still tick loyally, even when you’re not looking. A mechanical watch doesn’t shout to be seen; it knows it’s not the centre of your attention, but it stays ready for when you glance down; when you need reminding that time is moving, gently but relentlessly.

I once read that every watch carries two pulses: its own, and yours. One is precise, the product of gears and springs engineered to perfection; the other is human, vulnerable, sometimes erratic. The magic happens when the two fall into step. When your heartbeat echoes the rhythm on your wrist, and for a fleeting moment, you and time are in sync. Not as master and servant, but as co-conspirators.

It’s curious, isn’t it, how people talk about watches as if they’re machines? That word feels so cold, so devoid of affection. But a good watch doesn’t behave like a machine. It behaves like a poet — precise, yes, but mysterious too. You wind it, and it lives. You ignore it, and it forgives. Try doing that with a smartphone. Leave it unwound for a few days and it doesn’t berate you; it simply stops, politely, as if waiting for you to come back to yourself.

And it never keeps time perfectly. There’s always that quiet imperfection: a few seconds lost here, a few gained there. But isn’t that exactly how we experience life? Not in perfect minutes, but in stretched-out mornings and collapsed afternoons? Time, as lived, is elastic. A mechanical watch understands that. It doesn’t argue with it. It simply drifts with you, making room for memory and mood.

Digital devices, for all their usefulness, feel transactional. A smartwatch will tell you how many steps you’ve taken, how many hours you’ve slept, how productive you’ve been. But a watch — a proper one — doesn’t care if you’ve met your goals. It’s not there to optimise your day. It’s there to accompany it. It’s a witness, not a manager.

When I was younger, I thought a watch had to do something. Be waterproof. Be sporty. Glow in the dark. Now I realise: its greatest function is to keep time without needing me to. To exist alongside me in a kind of quiet companionship. I wear it the way I wear my grandmother’s ring, not because it’s useful, but because it reminds me I belong to something longer than the moment I’m in.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s quartz or automatic or powered by the sun. What matters is that it sits against your skin and gets to know the shape of your days. Watches don’t just count time, they gather it. They collect it like pressed flowers in a book: each tick a petal, preserved not for analysis but for feeling.

So much of modern life is about explaining. Analysing. Uploading. But some things are meant to be worn, not translated. A watch doesn’t need to make a statement. It just needs to be there. To bear witness. To listen. To mark, quietly, the story you’re writing — one second at a time.

Defying the Digital: The Enduring Allure of the Mechanical

There’s something quietly defiant about a mechanical watch. In a world obsessed with the instantaneous, it refuses to hurry. It ticks at its own pace, immune to the dopamine economy of swipes, scrolls, and screen refreshes. It doesn't buzz. It doesn’t ping. It doesn’t track your REM cycles, count your calories, or tell you you’ve been sedentary for too long. All it does is keep time exquisitely.

I was standing at Watches & Wonders Geneva yesterday, surrounded by the horological elite — brands that have been building time, not just measuring it, for centuries. There were 60 of them this year, each with booths like cathedrals, quiet but reverent, humming with the kind of detail modern life often bulldozes. And despite the fact that most of us walked in with digital calendars and phones that could theoretically replace every complication on display, we were there for something else entirely: not utility, but reverence. Devotion, even.

A mechanical watch is the last intimate machine. Not because it’s private, but because it demands a relationship. You don’t plug it in; you wind it. You don’t update it; you service it. You wear it close, against the pulse point. It doesn’t just sit there — it listens, it adjusts, it breathes.

There’s a phrase I once heard, describing old violins: “wood that remembers being a tree.” I think about that every time I look at a beautifully aged watch. It remembers too. Not just how it was made — with hands and tools and someone squinting through a loupe at a balance spring thinner than a strand of hair — but also how it has lived. The scratches on the case, the patina on the dial, the way the leather strap darkens at the edges… it’s all proof that it didn’t just exist in a drawer. It accompanied someone. It shared a life.

Smartwatches, for all their features, age like milk. They are designed to be replaced. The new one is always sleeker, always smarter, always just out of reach. In contrast, a mechanical watch becomes more itself with time. It doesn’t aspire to be anything else. There’s a kind of honesty in that, a refusal to participate in the endless hamster wheel of upgrades. It knows that beauty isn't in newness, but in continuity.

Sometimes I wonder if the allure of mechanical watches isn’t just nostalgia, though there’s certainly some of that, but rebellion. A small, elegant protest against the tyranny of the urgent. Against everything being everywhere all at once. When you wear a mechanical watch, you’re choosing presence over performance. You’re saying, in effect, “I don’t need my wrist to tell me I’m late to my own life.”

And then there’s the sheer poetry of the movement itself. Open the caseback and it’s like peering into a tiny kinetic cathedral. Gears turning, springs coiling, levers dancing in sync. Not for an audience. Not for applause. Just because that’s what they were born to do. It’s like watching a heartbeat. Except this one is eternal, as long as you remember to wind it. It doesn’t have to be particularly ostentatious. No diamonds. No brand name the size of a billboard. Just a small, quietly ticking thing. Hold it not like a gadget, but like a story you might one day be written into. That’s what a mechanical watch offers. Not a tool, but a future heirloom.

We often speak about legacy in the abstract. What we leave behind, who we were, what we meant. But a watch is a legacy made wearable. It’s not a symbol of wealth, though it often wears one. It’s a symbol of care. Of time, not just counted, but kept. Preserved.

And perhaps that’s the crux of it. In a digital age where everything is streamed, stored in clouds, erased with a swipe — a mechanical watch is stubbornly, exquisitely, here. It’s memory you can wind. Craftsmanship you can feel. Time you can hear, whispering in tiny ticks against your wrist, reminding you that not everything has to be efficient to be meaningful.

In fact, some things are meaningful precisely because they aren’t.

When Seconds Are Sacred: Watches and Ritual

There’s a small, almost imperceptible theatre to fastening a watch. The curl of the strap, the snug click of the clasp, the soft settling of weight against the wrist — it’s choreography that asks for no applause, only presence. And yet it’s a gesture steeped in reverence. A private rite performed before the altar of the day. In a world where most rituals have been flattened by convenience or forgotten entirely, the act of putting on a watch remains a small defiance. A way of saying, “I am here. I am keeping time, not chasing it.”

A watch doesn’t scream for your attention like a phone does. It doesn’t vibrate or flash or ping (unless you’re one of those people who purposely show your wrist and watch in selfies. Not judging. You do you.) It merely exists, faithfully and quietly, until you look. And when you do, it offers time in its purest form: unadorned, unperformed, unhurried. There's a kind of grace in that, like a friend who waits patiently for you to notice they’ve arrived.

There’s something almost monastic about those who wind their watch each morning. It’s not a chore; it’s communion. A gesture of care, not necessity. The winding crown is a relic from a time when attention had a different rhythm, and hands had memory. Some people cross themselves, others do sun salutations, and then there are those who wind their watch with the same quiet devotion.

But ritual doesn’t only happen in solitude. At the event in Geneva, I watched two older men, strangers, strike up a conversation over a mutual glance at the same model in a display. It began with a nod, the way collectors often acknowledge each other, like members of some secret brotherhood of gears and springs. Within minutes, they were swapping anecdotes like seasoned soldiers of time: “My first watch was a graduation gift, 1984, steel bracelet, never lost a second.” “Mine? My father’s. He wore it every day until the crown fell off, and then I wore it just the same.”

Watches have a way of carrying lineage in their cases. You don’t inherit just an object; you inherit the moments it bore witness to. A wristwatch worn every day becomes a kind of skin, it absorbs the joys, the losses, the sweat of travel, the stillness of waiting rooms. And when passed down, it carries those traces. A worn strap. A scratch near the lugs. The ghost of another life.

That’s what ritual does, really. It makes the ordinary sacred. In the noise of modernity, where everything is designed to distract, the act of wearing a watch remains beautifully focused. It’s analogue in the best way. Tactile. Slow. Intentional. Even the way you check the time on a watch is different — not a flicker of the phone screen while pretending to text, but a deliberate turn of the wrist. It’s a gesture that asks: how much time have I spent, and how much is left?

I’ve always loved the paradox of a watch: an object built to measure time that seems, somehow, to slow it. You look down at it and instead of panic, you feel anchored. Grounded. There’s no urgent red bubble screaming that someone needs you. No banner ad. Just seconds, ticking away in their quiet, sacred rhythm. And it makes you listen.

It makes you remember that time is not just something we run out of. It’s something we inhabit.

And perhaps that’s why even in this age of AI assistants and wrist-worn heart monitors and screens that double as mirrors for our anxiety, the mechanical watch refuses to vanish. Because it doesn’t want anything from you. It simply wants to be worn. Witnessed. Wound.

So yes, donning a watch is a ritual. But it’s also a kind of whisper, “You’re alive, and time is passing, and somehow both of those things are miraculous.”

Wrist as Canvas: Design, Desire, and Identity

Watches, for all their mechanical seriousness, are first and foremost worn on the body. And the wrist — that slim, often-overlooked bit of real estate between hand and forearm — has become something of a battleground. Not for status alone, though that game is always being played. But for expression. Desire. Memory. Mood. If clothes speak, then watches whisper, and the best ones know how to flirt.

At Watches & Wonders, you don’t just observe timepieces, you encounter them. They sit behind glass like little gods. Some sparkle so much they seem to hum with self-satisfaction. Others exude a quiet gravity, like they’ve kept time for emperors. What strikes me most, though, is how each one asks the same question in a different accent: “Who are you when you wear me?”

Because watches, like perfume or handwriting, tell on us. A sleek Bauhaus design speaks to restraint, precision, a studied aloofness. A gold chronograph might suggest ambition, or inherited wealth, or a fondness for 1980s Miami. A chunky diver’s watch on someone who’s never been within 200 metres of the ocean? That’s theatre. And no less valid. The wrist becomes a stage, and the watch, a kind of costume jewellery for those who’d rather not admit they care about jewellery.

I’ve seen people match watches to moods like others do with shoes. I’ve done it myself. The severe, black ceramic one for days when I need armour. The vintage Patek that belonged to my grandfather, worn when my grandmother wants a memory close by. The delicate ladies’ Rolex I stole, sorry, inherited… from my mother, which feels like wearing her elegance in miniature. These are not just accessories. They are fragments of autobiography, worn in plain sight.

Design is never just about design. It is about desire. It’s the invisible part of aesthetics, the thing that pulls you towards one object over another. You don’t buy a watch because you need to know the time. You buy a watch because you want to be the kind of person who wears that watch. Because something about it speaks to your secret architecture, the version of yourself you suspect might be truer than the one the world sees.

And that’s where the artistry lies. A watchmaker isn’t just assembling parts. They’re sketching identities. A hand-polished case, a sunray dial, a crown so small it feels like a secret — these are design decisions, yes, but they are also intimate proposals. Would you like to feel powerful? Would you like to feel adored? Would you like to feel understood?

A timepiece becomes a kind of mirror. Not one that reflects the face, but the intention behind it. You glance down at your wrist and, depending on the hour or the room or the company you’re in, you see something different. A bolder self. A quieter one. A self that remembered to be on time. A self that did not.

What fascinates me is how even the most minimalist designs end up saturated with meaning. A plain silver watch on a slim leather strap says, “I do not need to shout to be heard.” And maybe that’s true. Or maybe it’s the loudest thing about them. There’s always a bit of theatre in subtlety, and the watch world knows this intimately. Even the simplest models have names that sound like poetry read in a whisper: Reverso, Nautilus, Calatrava. One suspects even the complications are philosophical: perpetual calendar, power reserve, tourbillon. These are not just features; they’re existential questions disguised as mechanics.

I spoke to someone at the event, an elderly man with impossibly elegant fingers, who said he wore the same model every day, a Patek Philippe from the 1970s, “because it reminds me to be slow.” He didn’t mean sluggish. He meant deliberate. Present. He treated his watch like a teacher, which felt so much more romantic than treating it like a stopwatch.

It’s strange to think that such small objects can contain so much of us. But perhaps that’s the magic. The wrist, after all, is where pulse meets purpose. To wear a watch is to carry intention at arm’s length. Not just to know what time it is — but to declare, quietly and with style, who you are while passing through it.

The Heirloom Code: Inheritance, Memory, and Metal

Some watches tick louder than others. Not mechanically, their movements are often near silent, but symbolically. They hum with the weight of history, of hands that have long since stopped moving but once wound them with quiet care. These are heirlooms. Not just timekeepers, but time travellers — and somewhere between their polished bezels and patinated cases lies the genetic code of belonging.

I’ve always found it curious how we pass down watches as though they were stories. Unspoken, unwritten, and yet dense with character. They don’t explain themselves, they expect you to listen. A dent on the case, a faded engraving, a stretched-out leather strap. These are not flaws. They are punctuation marks in a sentence that spans generations.

My father has a habit of gifting watches for milestones. Each achievement crystallised in steel or gold. A career moment? Time to go automatic. A wedding anniversary? Enter something Swiss and sentimental. For him, the watch is never the prize, it’s the punctuation. A full stop at the end of a chapter, or sometimes a semicolon: the suggestion that the story continues. When I ask him why a watch and not a painting, or a holiday, or even a car, he shrugs in that way men shrug when their feelings are too heavy to carry in words. “Because it stays,” he says. “Because it remembers.”

There is something unnervingly human about a mechanical watch. It breathes in its own way, wheezing slightly when overdue for a service. It can be fragile, temperamental, slow to adjust to daylight savings, much like the people who wear it. And yet, unlike us, it was built to be passed on. When you inherit a watch, you don’t just receive an object. You inherit its heartbeat. You wear someone else’s rhythm. You inherit their lateness, their punctuality, their sense of occasion. In some strange way, it’s intimacy by proxy.

I inherited my first watch by accident. It had been tucked away in a drawer, forgotten. A classic, understated piece: small face, minimal dial, the leather strap cracked like dry earth. It was my grandfather’s. I never met him, but I felt I knew him through the way the watch had worn down. He had clearly fiddled with it, the crown was slightly loose from years of habitual adjusting. The back had a scratch, like it had been dropped and picked up without panic. Practical man, I imagine. Quiet. The kind to check the time and never mention being late.

There’s a poetry to wearing a dead man’s watch. Not in the gothic sense, there’s nothing morbid about it, but rather in the way time continues despite its previous owner no longer needing it. You become the new custodian of their seconds. And in that, there’s something deeply affirming. Continuity wrapped around your wrist.

But it’s not always sentimental. Sometimes it’s complicated. Heirlooms don’t come with disclaimers. A watch might remind you of someone you adored. Or someone you’ve tried very hard to forget. It might be beautiful, but heavy. Precious, but politically incorrect. Perhaps it was earned. Perhaps it was looted. Perhaps it was bought in a fever of post-divorce reinvention and passed on with zero context. The point is: inheritance is rarely clean. But then again, neither is memory.

And yet, we keep passing them down. Watchmakers know this — that what they’re creating isn’t just functional, it’s cultural. It’s not only about now. It’s about later. And not the shallow later of marketing campaigns or New Year’s resolutions, the true later. The one that speaks of decades. Of funerals and baptisms. Of children who grow into adults and find themselves winding the same crown their mother once did, not knowing whether to cry or smile or both.

To inherit a watch is to join a lineage. Not of blood, necessarily, but of time. And in a world that is increasingly disposable, that kind of permanence feels radical. We archive our identities in objects, we embed memory in metal. We wear the past in plain sight and call it style, but really, it’s mourning dressed up as celebration.

The heirloom watch is not a status symbol. It’s a survival story. And every tick is a tiny reminder: you are still here.

Ticking Against the Clock: Why Watches Outlast Trends

Some things weren’t made to trend. They were made to endure.

At Watches & Wonders in Geneva, I saw pieces so timeless they felt almost defiant. A landscape of glowing vitrines and men in quiet tailoring, where sapphire crystal faces blinked under museum lighting like precious insects trapped mid-flight. No one said it aloud, but we all knew: this was less about fashion, more about legacy.

Watches are curious rebels. They do not scream for relevance. They do not contort themselves to stay viral. And yet they remain. Not because they evolve fast, but because they refuse to. In a world of trends that expire faster than milk, the mechanical watch insists on being a thing you learn to love slowly.

Most trends are built to be shed. A flicker of novelty, a flirtation with reinvention. They change with the algorithm, update with the feed. Watches, on the other hand, ask for commitment. They are not fashion’s fling; they are its foil. To wear one is to imply continuity. To whisper, even if only to yourself, I plan to be here a while.

I’ve always been suspicious of “it” items. That season’s bag, that shoe. The frantic need to belong — and the quiet panic once the item becomes passé. With watches, there is no such rush. A good piece can be 70 years old and still feel modern, not because it follows fashion, but because it outpaces it entirely. There’s a kind of grace in that, a slowness that doesn’t apologise. A style that isn’t so much about being current as it is about being certain.

There’s something about the wrist that feels personal, almost vulnerable. We wear fragrance on the neck, rings on fingers, sunglasses on the face — all places of projection, defence, drama. But the wrist? It’s close to the pulse. Intimate. Less performative, more persistent. A watch lives in this strange liminal space between function and adornment, presence and past. It is style tethered to survival. You wear it not to impress, but to anchor. Even if you’re not checking the time, the time is always with you.

Trends, by contrast, are loud. They demand attention. Their charm is their volatility. But charm has an expiry date, and most things you buy to impress others end up ageing like milk, not wine. Watches aren’t performative in the same way. Yes, some are status symbols, but even then, the codes are subtle. A quiet glint. A name only recognisable if you know where to look. They speak in fluency, not flash.

There’s also something refreshing about an object that doesn’t constantly upgrade itself. Watches don’t need new operating systems. They don’t buzz with meaningless updates. They don’t spy on your steps, or your sleep, or your serotonin. They simply do the thing they were born to do: mark time. Every tick is a reminder that the best technology is often the one that doesn’t care about your metrics.

I suppose that’s why they’ve lasted. Watches don’t pretend to be anything other than what they are. In a world increasingly obsessed with transformation — glow-ups, rebrands, reinvention arcs — they remain stubbornly themselves. They don’t demand your attention. They simply wait for you to notice.

And people do notice. The older I get, the more I see watches worn as quiet acts of resistance. Against trend-chasing. Against disposability. Against the algorithm’s thirst for novelty. A beautiful watch doesn’t scream Look at me. It murmurs I’ve been here before. It asks nothing of you, except that you slow down long enough to feel the rhythm.

I remember once seeing a man in Saint Tropez reading a tattered hardback, dressed in the kind of coat that had clearly lived many winters. On his wrist, a watch I recognised only because I’d seen it once in a book — a vintage Vacheron Constantin, probably older than I was. There was something ineffably dignified about him. Not because he had money, or taste, or some curated aesthetic, but because nothing about him felt temporary. He had built a life, not a feed. And his watch was part of that scaffolding.

That, I think, is the difference. Trends decorate you for a moment. Watches accompany you through decades.

They are not content. They are context.

And in a world where so much is made to vanish, to rot in drawers or linger in resale purgatory, it is a rare and wondrous thing to wear something that plans to outlive you.

Embracing the Intimacy of Time

Watches are not merely worn. They are lived with.

They do not beep or blink or beg to be charged. They simply exist, humming gently against the skin like a secret only your wrist knows. There is something almost romantic about that sort of loyalty. A quiet companion that never interrupts, only reminds.

At Watches & Wonders, amidst the gloss and spectacle, it was the silence that struck me most. The reverent hush that falls when someone leans in close to admire a balance wheel as if it were a breathing heart. These weren’t gadgets. They were relics in motion. Little machines that had no business surviving this long in a world like ours — and yet, there they were, ticking. Insisting.

In an age where time is chopped into notifications and attention spans are monetised, the steady rhythm of a mechanical watch feels almost... subversive. It does not ask what’s next. It anchors you to now. Not in the mindfulness app sort of way, but in the older, truer sense, the kind that smells faintly of leather straps and old memories.

As I left Geneva, wrist slightly heavier, heart unexpectedly lighter, I realised this: a watch is not about telling time. It’s about holding it. Close. Quiet. Yours.

In a world that screams for attention, a watch whispers the oldest truth: time is not kept, it is kept with.

And that, I think, is the most intimate rebellion of all.

S xoxo

Written in Geneva, Switzerland

2nd April 2025