There comes a point in one’s watch collecting journey where you might ask yourself – Is this an addiction? Why am I spending time and money on a seemingly meaningless activity?
We collect watches because we enjoy it, that is pretty obvious. And as with anything one enjoys, it’s all peachy as long as there’s balance. As long as there’s not too much of it. What is too much of something is normally defined by the context. Too much food is when we gain undesired weight, too much sun is when we get a burn, too much work is when we start to neglect our health and family.
When is too much too much?
Too much watch collecting is a more subjective threshold. For me it’s when I feel guilty because I spend resources that could’ve gone towards improving and investing in my life in some way, be it health, relationships, knowledge or something else. And I do feel this from time to time. Time, yes, indeed time is ironically the resource I feel most guilty about putting into my watch collection.
Luckily I don’t hoard watches, and I enjoy cheap watches just as much as expensive ones so it’s not an expensive hobby either. It’s mainly the time that goes into browsing watches online. But also the cognitive dissonance from growing a collection of items that I don’t need. I hate waste and try to keep in my life only things I need and use regularly. A more sensible collection of watches, where each watch has a distinct function, would be in the range of two to five.
My collection is currently 12 and growing, excluding my Gloriousdays watches.
Can you stop collecting watches?
But am I addicted? Addiction would imply that I cannot control my desires and luckily it hasn’t gone that far. For people with hundreds of watches I have to wonder though. Can they stop if they wanted to? What’s missing in their life that they’re trying to fill with all these watches?
I have periods when I browse watches online for hours every day. Then I have periods when I hardly even think about watches at all. Those periods are usually filled with something else, like recently when I started wakeboarding and don’t think about anything but the next trick I’ll try on the cable.
Filling the void
I believe we collect objects as a substitute for something more meaningful. We lack something in our life and we look the other way and bombard out senses with ‘stuff’ to not have to face this fact.
So regardless of what you’re collecting, and even if it’s far from an addiction, ask yourself this – what’s my collection a substitute for? What’s missing in my life?