The Apple Watch and Relative Time
or, what to do about that object on your wrist?
While we usually think of Einstein when considering modern notions of time, David Hume beat him to the punch by a couple of centuries when he made the (at the time) outrageous claim that universal time, independent of a subject position, does not exist. In other words, if time happens in a forest and there is no one around to hear, then time hasn’t actually happened. Time is, therefore, relative. It exists, to the extent that it does at all, in relation to changing objects in the universe.
How did I arrive at this contemplation of time since we last met, dear reader? In “How to Escape from your iPhone,” you may recall, I considered the extent to which the smartphone and other devices have colonized our brains and suggested how we might start the process of decolonization: carrying a notebook in a pocket instead of a phone, putting away the phone unless there is a specific use in a certain moment, and wearing an old-fashioned watch instead of a smartwatch. This final item was almost an afterthought in the piece, though I did feature a photo of my fabulous thirty-dollar Casio. Over the next couple of weeks, I went down a rabbit hole of horology, starting innocently enough with review videos of watches on YouTube, quickly escalating to my reading of a history of horology, and culminating (for the moment) in my binge-reading of articles on the nature of time in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Welcome to my addled brain.
But stay with me: that progression from wristwatches to philosophical rumination makes a kind of sense. Time is personal. Time is about our relationships—with objects, with others, with ourselves.
The nature of these relationships manifests in our timepieces. For example, in the late Middle Ages, time measured by timepieces became a shared public experience in Western Europe, as massive clocks in church towers chimed the hours and transmitted shared temporal information, but in the seventeenth century, as personal watches became more common, the experience of time became more individual and private. Since watches were not nearly as accurate as they would be a couple of centuries later, each watch-wielding person literally had their own time, which might differ significantly from unsynchronized others. (The earliest personal watches had only an hour hand because they were not accurate enough for the specificity of minutes or seconds.) Then, when wristwatches became common in the late nineteenth century, they became means of personal expression and ornamentation.
They had the capacity, however, just like the modern smartphone, to colonize the selfhood of the wearer. In Gulliver’s Travels, when the Lilliputians go through Gulliver’s pockets, they discover his watch and are puzzled by it:
We directed him to draw out whatever was at the end of that chain; which appeared to be a globe, half silver, and half of some transparent metal; for, on the transparent side, we saw certain strange figures circularly drawn, and thought we could touch them, till we found our fingers stopped by the lucid substance. He put this engine into our ears, which made an incessant noise, like that of a water-mill: and we conjecture it is either some unknown animal, or the god that he worships; but we are more inclined to the latter opinion, because he assured us, (if we understood him right, for he expressed himself very imperfectly) that he seldom did any thing without consulting it. He called it his oracle, and said, it pointed out the time for every action of his life.
When I teach Swift at my university, students are often struck by this passage and how much it seems to describe their own relationships to their phones.
If we consider the fact that Swift wrote this in the early eighteenth century, then we may surmize that Gulliver’s watch included a balance spring, invented some fifty years earlier, which means that it would have been more accurate than earlier personal timepieces. In its essential mechanism, therefore, it would have had a lot in common with the mechanical watches that were widely used until 1969, when Seiko introduced the first mass-produced quartz watch and ushered in the “Quartz Revolution” or the “Quartz Crisis,” depending on one’s view—and which, indeed, are still widely used by enthusists even now.
Quartz watches were much more accurate, much less expensive, and required less maintainence than traditional mechanical watches—and they made it possible for me as a preadolescent boy without much money (along with millions like me) to acquire that little plastic miracle: a Casio.
Since that first Casio, I have worn a watch almost every day of my life, to the point that I feel incomplete without one. (Lately, when I stopped wearing a watch during my yoga practice, I realized how much I have depended on it to tell my left from my right.) All of my watches have been quartz, and I have usually had only one at a time—or perhaps two (one for work, one for exercise). I’ve had a few Casios, a couple of Seikos, a cheap Timex, a Raymond Weil (high-school graduation gift), a Cuneiform dress watch from the British Museum (which I still have), and a couple of Apple Watches. I don’t know where most of these old watches are now, since I’ve never been a collector. These days, I wish I still had those Seikos and the Raymond Weil—all great watches that each lasted through a decade or more of daily wear.
After my switch to the Apple Watch a few years ago, I gradually began to realize that my relationship with my timepiece had changed. Before, my watch had always been a source of comfort, a constant companion—always there when I needed it and requiring only a new battery every few years. The Apple Watch was both more needy and more assertive: why haven’t you taken more steps today? why did you wash your hands for only eighteen seconds? don’t you want to read this new text? don’t forget your next meeting—it’s in ten minutes! don’t forget to charge me this evening, my power is low!
It took a long time—a few years, in fact—before I began to realize that my watch had become a source of anxiety and had changed my personal sense of time. My time felt less like it belonged to me, and more like it belonged to a range of obligations and demands that were dictated by this slab of glass and metal on my wrist. Also, it was huge. I “upgraded” to the Apple Watch Ultra when it came out, with its promise of better battery life and a more usable keyboard. It made good on those promises, but it was by far the biggest, heaviest watch I had ever owned. You could never forget that it was on your wrist. It was the opposite of my thirty-gram Casio—which I have often forgotten to take off at bedtime because it’s so light and comfortable.
Donning the Apple Watch Ultra felt like wearing a computer on my wrist, because, well—that’s exactly what I was doing.
It may seem strange that what seems to be such a minor decision—to change from a regular watch to a smart watch—would make such an enormous difference in my life. But, again, our relationship to time is personal, as Hume and Einstein have shown us.
It was time to make a change for the sake of time. To be continued . . .
Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet timepiece to yours.
I found the Apple Watch to be tyrannical and gave up on it some two years ago--so big time relate!
Don't enable all the gizmos and just use as a watch.