Date-Adjust Day

Part four in a series of indeterminate length (though this is probably the final installment for a while)

You may read part one of this series here, part two here, and part three here.

These are the watches that I wore during my recent experiment. (Not all at once, except for this picture!) They are, from right to left, an analog solar, an analog quartz, an Apple Watch Ultra, an automatic mechanical, and a digital. The only thing that I still like about my Apple Watch is Snoopy.

As I write this, it is Date-Adjust Day. This is a holiday that, as far as I am aware, I invented. There are five of them each year, at, respectively, the first of March, May, July, October, and December.

Those of you of a certain age may have already figured out what this day marks: it is the day when, if you wear an analog watch with a date window, you must adjust it. For example, when I woke up this morning, my analog Citizen informed me that it was the thirty-first day of the month, but—as you know—June has only thirty days, and so it is actually the first day of July. So I pulled out the crown on the watch to the first position and turned it until the date flipped over.

Those of you who use a smartwatch or your phone to tell the time need not concern yourself with DA Day. Heck, even my digital Casio G-Shock, which is not a smartwatch, has a perpetual calendar and, therefore, “understands” what month and day it is without my occasional assistance. (It even knows when the switch to or from Daylight-Savings Time occurs, but that’s another story; it also knows what time it is in Paris and Tokyo. I love my G-Shock.)

So, why would one choose a timepiece that is so “dumb” that it doesn’t even know what day it is without fail?

Here is the too-long-didn’t-read (TLDR) answer: this is not a logical decision but an aesthetic one.

That’s the short answer, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. It also has to do with habit, with a certain contrarian disposition, and with the ingrained idea that the ability to read an analog watch or clock is a necessary life skill, along with tying shoes and balancing a checkbook. (OK, that last one is a bad example.)

Reading an analog dial is clearly no longer a necessary life skill (though it may still be a useful one), as became apparent to me lately when I watched a segment of Jimmy Kimmel’s show, in which a number of normal-looking New Yorkers in their twenties and thirties were asked to read one. They all struggled, and most couldn’t do it at all. It is perhaps a sign of how out of touch I am with the Zeitgeist that this astonished me—until I quizzed my daughter, who recently turned seventeen, and found that she, too, struggled to read my watch. (To her credit, she wants to learn, and since then she has practiced and gotten better at it.)

Now, this is not going to be a rant against younger generations or an elegy to a lost age. This change seems neither good nor bad, but I wonder if it signals a different way of perceiving and experiencing time, in addition to a different way of reading it. As we discussed earlier in this series, the historical development of the personal timepiece in the early modern period initiated a way of experiencing time that was quite different from depending on the chimes from the medieval church tower to signal the hour, and the church clock marked a perceptual change from telling time by the sun. Are we currently going through a similar shift?

My little personal experiment that I announced at the end of the last post was partly an attempt to consider this question of different ways of perceiving time. The results were not particularly enlightening, to be honest. I found that I preferred different types of watches (analog, digital, sport, diver) depending on my mood, what I was doing, and what outfit I was wearing, and I enjoyed all of them—except for the smartwatch, Snoopy notwithstanding. (The Snoopy watch face is almost enough to convince me to keep my Apple Watch.)

But the experiment did make me more observant of others and what sorts of timepieces that they were wearing—in the coffee shop, on the street, out and about. I found that few people were wearing watches at all, and those who were doing so were almost all wearing some variety of smartwatch, usually an Apple Watch. I realize that this trend may differ according to where you live, but next time you are out in public, look around and see how many watches you see at all, and specifically how many that are analog. I would bet not many.

Probably the most obvious upshot of this scarcity of traditional watches is that it shows the extent of the tech industry’s success in making us dependent on them in even the most mundane ways—to the point that most adults do not wear watches at all and simply use their phones as timepieces. And the tech industry has colonized the wrist space of most of those who do wear watches—to the point that checking one’s phone no longer requires the effort of reaching into a pocket but can be accomplished by the mere turning of the left arm. The phone and smartwatch have become cyborg extensions of the self.

In recent years, the Apple Watch has outsold the entire Swiss watch industry. But don’t weep for Rolex and Omega: they are still doing just fine.

I think that’s about as far as I can take this current series, at least until something else occurs to me. But please let me know in the comments: what do you make of the decline of the analog watch and the rise of the smartwatch? How is it significant? Do you think that it is problem that so many younger people cannot read an analog dial? Or does it not matter at all?

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet G-Shock to yours.