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In watch culture today, “tool watches” are those meant for physical activity; the gym, swimming, scaling Mount Everest, setting new freediving records – you know, the things we all do, all the time. In reality, every watch is a tool, regardless of its water resistance rating or its ability to survive a drop from a three-story building. Organizing human activity is a major logistical challenge, and many require timing and coordination, though the degree to which that’s true varies. Timing military operations to achieve maximum pressure on the objective needs a little bit more coordination than meeting with some friends for lunch across town (though that may depend on the friend group).

The uniform is uniform, but the watch remains an expressive blend of utility and aesthetic style unique to that military professional. Not exclusive to, but prevalent within the Special Operations community is the facilitation of relationships through common interests. The first SOF Truth states: “humans are more important than hardware”. For the Special Operations professional, people—not equipment, make the critical difference. Ironically, many of us are bonding over hardware…our watches.

It’s been almost ten years since we’ve started the Two Broke Watch Snobs podcast and when I sit back to think about that, I can’t help but realize how much this hobby has monopolized my time and headspace. It’s not really a bad thing, well not all the time. But this year I really tried to be mindful about how much this deep interest impacted my day-to-day life, especially all the time that it takes up between family and work obligations. The truth is—and I think deep down we all know this—watch collecting is an exceedingly unnecessary endeavor when you think about life at a macroscopic scale.

In a shadowy world of spies, double agents, black ops soldiers, and even zombies, watches can be essential tools used to coordinate attacks, anticipate timed explosives, and a variety of other tasks, especially when it’s 1991. But in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and real life 2024, they are primarily a fashion statement.

Watch budgeting is a funny thing. For most collectors, it involves a significant amount of mental gymnastics as money is moved in and out of an imaginary bank. We say things like “sorry, no funds in the watch bank” when our friends are selling a watch we don’t want to buy. But when Jomashop is offering a deal on that Seiko we’ve been lusting over, funds are magically ready for immediate withdrawal. Sometimes this is because we’ve recently sold some watches and actually have a positive balance in the watch bank. But often, we buy that new Seiko on “credit” with a self-promise to liquidate the current collection to restore financial balance.