It’s a sneaky secret, but the truth is everyone in the watch world occasionally gets a little tired of watches. Okay, I can’t speak for everyone, and ‘tired’ might be the wrong word, but anyone who has ever worked in an enthusiast field would probably tell you that balancing your own enthusiasm with a professional life can be a tricky thing. Enthusiasm itself is not a boundless resource, and sometimes you can find yourself in need of a cool-down period (something Nathan Schultz described beautifully here).

Coming into 2024, I had no idea this year would be one of those cool-down periods (it can be hard to notice one while it’s happening) but looking back at the last twelve months, it’s hard to deny the characterization. It’s not that I love watches any less than I did last year, it’s just that, as I wade deeper into the watch universe, my own collecting has taken a backseat.

Going into 2023, I made a conscious decision I wouldn’t buy any watches. Instead, I would save up and make one big purchase at the end of the year. Then I got to March, bought a G-Shock, and opened the floodgates. So when Zach asked me to put a New Year’s Resolution on paper back in January of this year, I went the other way, stating with intention that this would be a buying year and that I would likely end the year with a Tudor, a NOMOS, or both. Instead, I’m ending the 2024 calendar year having bought just three watches, none of which cost more than $110 dollars.

I’ve been what could reasonably be described as a watch enthusiast for over 15 years now (though I’ve been interested in watches as long as I can remember), and, for a lot of that time, I’ve measured my watch enthusiasm through forward momentum in my collecting (or, more accurately, my acquiring). I — and I don’t think I’m alone in this — was obsessed with the idea of the next watch and probably spent more time thinking about hypothetical future purchases than about the watches I already had and loved.

In hindsight, I think some of that need for ‘forward’ momentum was born of insecurity; it was as if I was trying to justify identifying myself as a watch enthusiast. After all, how could I possibly group myself with the collectors I saw on Instagram rotating through a constant stream of NWAs (and in some cases, GLWSs) if I wasn’t at least trying to keep the new flowing through my collection? At this point, a decade and a half into this peculiar obsession, I don’t feel that same need to justify my presence in enthusiast spaces and, mercifully, I seem to have been able to divorce my instinct for acquisition from my broader enthusiasm. 

Admittedly, I’m saying all of this from a remarkably fortunate position. By the nature of my work, I get to satisfy any need I might have for novelty. Press pieces, long-term loans from friends and colleagues, and (in the spirit of pure candor) the occasional gift, mean I get to experience new watches with enough regularity to keep me sated, at least mostly. The net result of this shift in perspective is that my watch drawer at the end of 2024 looks an awful lot like it did at the beginning of 2024. 

In other words, ‘newness’ has become a break in the routine rather than the routine itself. I’m sure this will swing in the other direction soon enough — I’m already starting to feel that familiar pull — but for right now, while there are plenty of watches I’m sure I’d enjoy, there’s nothing I’m actually feeling a strong urge to own, and it’s pretty much been that way all year.

This shift away from purchasing as the primary engine of enthusiasm does bring up a big question, one I’ve been grappling with for a while: What does it mean to engage with enthusiasm? Watch enthusiasm, like other enthusiast pursuits focused on collecting, is inherently tied to consumerism. In and of itself there’s nothing wrong with this — if we were all content with one watch forever neither this publication nor this industry would exist in anything close to the form you see today — but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with pointing out that consumerism for consumerism’s sake is a risky proposition.

I think most of us sort of understand this instinctively. At the very least, most of us understand that indiscriminate and frequent watch purchases aren’t a practical option — we collect with constraints. For the most fortunate among us, those constraints may be self-imposed, but broadly speaking, these constraints are practical. And I know, it can be frustrating when the perfect LE drops but you don’t have the flexibility to make it happen, but constraints are a good thing, and it is out of these constraints that the best part of our community has grown; namely, that this hobby is a community.

Community is such a big part of the watch-collecting hobby, and it’s certainly my favorite part of it. Collectors are, by their nature, interested (though, regrettably, not always interesting), and I love spending time with interested people. There aren’t many traits that can entirely put me off a person, but apathy occupies a prime position on that short list. Whether we’re interested in the same things, the most exciting people to me are the ones who are interested in something — anything (well, almost anything) — passionately and deeply.

It may be a by-product of the spaces I choose to put myself in, but it’s been my observation that hobbies with inherent limits tend to draw interesting people and build wonderful communities (even better if all this is paired with an esoteric knowledge base). We, as collectors, tend to fill the gap between our purchasing and our knowledge with interaction, and stringing enough of those interactions together inevitably yields a community — one I’ve seen in action all across the country this year.

Whether it be at Windup fairs; in Slack channels, Discords, and WhatsApps; or in meetups at random breweries up and down the eastern seaboard (and on one midwestern lake), my year in watches was defined by the people I got to engage with and the community I got to be a part of through this work, and through the anachronistic little marvels we’re all entirely too obsessed with. And taking the pressure off the watches has meant I’ve gotten to spend more of my time focused on the people instead of the watches.

Now, I don’t expect that my 2025 in watches will look all that similar to my 2024 — I’ve learned enough to recognize that sort of prediction as unlikely — but I do hope that I can draw some of the perspective I’ve picked up into the new year. Still, once 2024 is in the rearview, it’s probably time for a new watch, right?