Mechanical watches
Every now and again, I decide to look into a field of interest — like home networking, or mechanical keyboards, or meditation — and after the first web search or two, I discover communities far larger and more deeply devoted to the pursuit of the subject than I would have thought possible. I stumble into the subreddits with their jargon, their memes, their local "zeitgeists"; I discover the YouTube influencers I’d never heard of before but which have 3 million subscribers each; I see the uncountable listicles of "Top 10 X’s in some subspeciality Y (2025 edition)". I’m always surprised at the scale and depth of activity, and often a bit scared, but at the same time a little bit awed.
This has happened most recently for me for the topic of mechanical watches. It occurred to me that my practice of using my mobile phone as a timepiece was getting under my skin — because it meant that I often got distracted by notifications when all I wanted to do was see the time — and that wearing a watch would eliminate my single most frequent reason for pulling my phone out of my pocket. This is somewhat of a reversal of my previous position that concentrating the maximum number of functions into the smallest possible number of devices was an embodiment of minimalism and simplicity. It turns out that it’s perhaps not that easy. I began to wonder if maybe consolidation isn’t always the answer, and that simplicity might sometimes best be found in simple objects that do one thing alone. Not so much the "Internet of Things" as "Things Without Internet".
So I innocently typed "mechanical watch for men 2025", expecting to get to the bottom of the matter after an hour or two’s investigation. Sweet summer child. Little did I know that when I peeked behind that door I’d find one of those larger-than-I-could-have-imagined internet communities with all of the hallmarks of one of those communities of belonging in which people take the hobby to an extreme, constructing an identity around being "watch nerds" and collectors, and shelling out gobsmacking amounts of cash to acquire these intricate machines, sometimes in a multiplicity that no two-wristed mammal could realistically expect to make sufficient use of in any reasonable way.
The first thing I discovered was that there aren’t just "mechanical watches", but "field watches", "dive watches", "tool watches", "pilot watches", "engineer watches", "racing watches", "dress watches", and countless other genres. There are titans, luxury brands, value brands, micro brands. Every possible axis of decision-making is populated by a range of options from the obscure to the mainstream, from the traditional to the avant garde, and from the economical to the ostentatious. Even after my relatively elementary excursions into the subject, I could probably already put together many thousands of words talking about all the choices one has to make to whittle it down to the watch type, feature set, price range, brand, and so on, to the point where you can actually pull the trigger and make a selection.
But that’s not my goal here. I just wanted to say that after all this, I don’t think there is a perfect watch. All there is is a series of compromises that can eventually lead you to a choice that feels right enough. At this point, after about 5 or so hours of research, I have looked at hundreds of watches and developed enough of a sensibility for things I like and do not like to know what I want.
In short:
- Given that this is all partly motivated as an act of rebellion against our big tech overlords, I was initially thinking that I just wanted a simple mechanical watch (ie. a watch you wind manually), not an automatic (self-winding) one. I figured the ritual of winding the watch every day or two might make we feel some kind of edifying sense of connection with the real, tactile, non-digital world; that it would be a kind of meditative act. But I found that as I searched for watches that matched my desiderata (below) I simply found way more automatic options than mechanical ones. Out of sheer pragmatism then, I decided to fish where the schools were swimming, and I opened my mind to buying an automatic watch if that was the one that best checked all my other boxes.
- I want what folks call a "one and one" and a "daily driver". Those are actually two subtly different things, albeit closely related ones, so let’s talk about them separately. First, by "one and done", I mean I only want one watch. I don’t want to start a collection. I want to buy something good enough that I won’t find myself angling for an upgrade soon after buying it. But neither do I want to break the bank buying something extravagant before I’m even sure that I’ll truly commit to wearing the thing every day (after not having worn a watch for most of my adult life). I need it to be versatile enough that I can use it for everything. This is where the objective starts to blend with that of "daily driver". Versatility means something casual enough to wear with a pair of shorts or jeans, but also compatible with an office environment or a formal one (relatively rare for me, but I do sometimes need to dress up). That in turn means a bunch of other things, like not being too bulky (or too small — it has to be in the "Goldilocks" zone), not being too heavy, but also being robust.
- I don’t want something ostentatious or luxurious; both of those just sound like recipes for spending more money than you need to. I’m not drawn to big brands — in fact, I feel somewhat of a revulsion to them — although I do appreciate quality. I have no interest in owning a Rolex, nor indeed any of the even-more-expensive brands that you could describe as "something that rich people buy, not because it’s better quality or more functional, but because it signifies that the buyer is rich". When I look at those, I don’t think "I wish I could afford that", but rather, "Yuck!". So, my goal is to find something that is good value for money, but keeping the price down isn’t my primary motivation; it something to be balanced against other objectives.
- So, to recap a theme that is developing over the last few points, I want a watch that I can use all the time without having to worry about it getting damaged or stolen; it should be durable and not too expensive. I want this thing to be good enough to last a lifetime or at least a sizeable chunk of it, but it need not become a family heirloom.
- I don’t want it to have any "bling" too it (ie. no shiny metals), I prefer it to have a matte finish or a brushed metal look (it really has to be metal so that it can straddle the divide between casual and formal). I prefer a black face because that is going to pair well with more contexts (clothing, environment etc). I’m not really interested in having a "dress watch", but I want something that looks respectable enough to use in dressy situations. I like watches that look a bit masculine, but not absurdly so (chunky things that look undecided about whether they’re timepieces or tanks).
- Aesthetically, I value simple, utilitarian design. I don’t need bells and whistles. I don’t need a diving bezel, I don’t need UTC or word clocks, nor a chronometer. About the farthest I’d go in the direction of "complications" if you can even call it that, would be a date window. My eyes aren’t getting any better, so I want a simple face without anything "busy" on it. And in terms of branding I want something that doesn’t scream out the name of its manufacturer; I want something subtle and discreet.
- These requirements push me into the realm of "field watches" and their neighbors. The watches that have resonated the most with me so far tend to be described as "tool watches", sometimes "field watches", or "pilot watches". There are some watches that inhabit spaces near enough to multiple categories that they wind up making it into more than one "top list" for different categories.
- As much as one might want to come up with a mathematical formula for ranking all the options against one another, there is a huge subjective element to this. Once I’ve ruled out a bunch of watches because they clearly don’t meet requirements, I am left with many (dozens) that come close (albeit none perfectly hit the bullseye). So, the rest comes down to intuition and subjective preference. Many you can drop down the list because they don’t "spark joy". It might be a question of proportions, or a curve, or the font used in a logo or a numeral. Conversely, something else is going to rise to the top of the list simply because it "feels" somehow right.
- I love watches which show off the movement via a transparent back cover, but I recognize that’s just a whimsical and emotional thing, and I know that my other criteria (about ruggedness and simplicity etc) bring me into territory where many of the options I’m looking at don’t have this feature; it’s definitely a "nice to have" and nothing more. If I choose a watch that doesn’t have it because it’s the way to obtain all the other things I’m looking for, then so be it. Similar to the "wanted mechanical, but will end up with automatic" situation I described above, what we have here is "would have loved a visible movement, but am not going to get one" scenario.
- How much to spend? Given that you can find watches for anywhere between, say, 50€ and 50,000€ (or even more, but I’m talking about the kinds of watches you can at least see in online stores, not the kinds of limited edition or rare specimens that you can only find at auction) you need to have some way of setting a budget. The fact that I want a "one and done" watch tends to exercise an upwards pressure on the price I’d need to pay, because I don’t want to buy something cheap only to regret it soon after. But my level of inexperience must exercise a countervailing, downwards pressure; I don’t want to blow a wad of cash on something only to experience buyers remorse. This is very context dependent, but as a rule of thumb, say that you’re living below you means (ie. not living paycheck-to-paycheck, but able to save some percentage of your earnings every month), then you should be able to define a threshold in terms of your income. For example, if you are living modestly with no debt and rarely spend on "discretionary" material goods, then you might be a able to set a guideline like "half a month’s salary" (as of 2025, the average monthly net salary in Spain is about 1,800€, so that would be 900€). Depending on your psychology and your personal circumstances you might be able to push higher, or need to go lower. Me personally, where I am right now, I feel at peace with the idea of spending about a quarter of my monthly salary (ie. one week) to get this watch. That’s enough to get something nice, but it keeps me far away from anything which might be considered extravagant.
- Finally, I’ll say that I’m not interested in "microbrands". I don’t care about being the only guy in the office to have some rare thing from a startup that only other watch nerds have heard of. It just doesn’t matter how cool it is. I’d much rather buy something from a company that operates in many countries all over the world, so I can get this thing repaired or serviced when it needs it, and ideally a company that has been established for many decades, so that I can be relatively confident that it will still be around when both me and my watch are old and need some extra love and care.
So, I think I’ve engaged in enough research now, commensurate with the level of outlay I’m going to incur. Once I’ve actually followed through and gotten the watch I may have more to say here about exactly what I choose and whether I stand by the decision process outlined above.
