Take a quick scan of any room you’re in and count the wrists. Most people don’t wear a watch anymore. Why would they? The phone in their pocket keeps more accurate time, syncs across time zones automatically, and does a thousand other things besides.
And yet a small, persistent minority still wears one. They’re not all old. They’re not all wealthy. They’re not all trying to make a fashion statement. When you ask them why, the answer is often oddly hard to articulate. Something about preferring it. Something about the way it feels.
I’ve come to think that “the way it feels” is actually pointing at something specific. The people who still wear a wristwatch have a relationship with time and attention that most of the rest of us quietly gave up, often without noticing what we were handing over or what we were getting in exchange.
The specific behaviour a watch preserves
Think about what happens the moment you need to know the time.
The watch-wearer turns their wrist, glances, and returns to whatever they were doing. The whole transaction takes about two seconds. No other information arrives. No feed loads. No notification catches their eye. No half-written message reminds them of another half-written message. The time comes in, the time is noted, and they’re back to the conversation or the walk or the meal.
The phone-checker does something entirely different, even though they think they’re doing the same thing. They reach into their pocket. A lock screen appears with notifications on it. Before their eyes have registered the time, they’ve seen a WhatsApp preview, an email subject line, and a headline about something terrible in another country. They tap through to clear the notification. They see an app badge with a number on it. They open that app to make the badge disappear. Eleven minutes later, they put the phone back in their pocket, having entirely forgotten what time it was.
One behaviour is a two-second intentional act. The other is an ambush the person sets on themselves and then loses every time.
What the research says is happening inside that difference
Adrian Ward at the University of Texas and his collaborators ran a now widely cited study published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, titled “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.”
What they found is striking. Even when participants didn’t check their phones, even when the phones were face down and silent, the cognitive capacity of people who had the phone on their desk was measurably lower than the cognitive capacity of people whose phones were in another room. The effect was larger for people who reported being more dependent on their phones. The study has had a more recent failed replication attempt, so the effect size is being debated, but the underlying idea that the mind spends resources managing the pull of a nearby phone has shown up in many other forms of attention research.
Separate lines of research have documented that frequent phone checking is directly associated with attention fragmentation, distraction, and task delay. The problem isn’t exotic. Every time you glance at the phone, your attention has to be reconfigured for the thing you were doing, and every reconfiguration costs a small tax in focus and working memory.
What the wristwatch-wearer has kept, without necessarily articulating it, is a tool for one of the most frequent cognitive actions of modern life, checking the time, that doesn’t levy that tax.
What most people gave up without noticing
When wristwatches got replaced by phones in most people’s lives, three specific things got quietly traded away.
The first was single-purpose attention. A watch does one thing. It tells you the time. You’ve never opened a watch and been distracted by it. The moment time-checking merged with every other digital activity, it stopped being a discrete act and became a trailhead that led somewhere else every time you approached it.
The second was intentional summoning. The watch doesn’t call you. You call it. You turn your wrist because you want the information. The phone, by contrast, summons you constantly, through notifications, through habit, through the subtle cognitive pull of its presence. The direction of attention reversed without most people noticing. Once you were the one choosing. Then you were the one being chosen.
The third was a small daily ritual. The watch-wearer puts the watch on in the morning. They might glance at it while winding it or charging it. They take it off at night. This sounds trivial. But small repeated rituals are how humans have always marked the structure of their days, and when you remove them all and replace them with one device that’s always there, the day loses a certain texture you don’t miss until you spend a week camping without service and remember what it felt like.
What the watch-wearer has, that most of us don’t
The thing I want to name clearly is not nostalgia. It’s not a judgment about phones, which are obviously useful and which I’m typing this article into right now. It’s something more specific.
The wristwatch preserves, for its wearer, a very small piece of evidence that time and attention belong to them. When they want to know the hour, they summon the hour. Nothing else arrives. No one else gets a turn in their head.
Most people have lost that entirely, and the loss is almost invisible because it happened in a thousand tiny micro-surrenders over about fifteen years. Each surrender was harmless on its own. The cumulative effect is a population of people who can’t be alone with a thought for two minutes, who check their phone reflexively at every light, every meal, every pause in a conversation, and who genuinely believe this is just what being alive looks like now.
The watch-wearer is a small living reminder that it isn’t. There was a world in which you asked the time and only got the time. People who kept the watch on their wrist are, quietly and usually without framing it this way, keeping that world alive on their own skin.
What the Buddhists understood about this
When I wrote Hidden Secrets of Buddhism, one of the ideas I kept returning to is that the direction of your attention is the direction of your life. The mind that is constantly pulled outward by whatever is loudest nearby has almost no space to meet its own day. The mind that summons its attention intentionally, one act at a time, has a very different quality of experience, even when nothing about the external circumstances has changed.
The wristwatch, as a daily practice, is a tiny tool for intentional attention. You decide to know the time. You look. You return. Nothing about the act hijacks you. In meditation terms, this is what’s happening every time you notice the breath, notice the thought, and return. It’s training in who gets to direct your mind.
The people who still wear watches may not meditate. But they’ve preserved, without calling it that, one small piece of equipment that supports the same quality of mind the cushion is trying to build.
A quieter suggestion
You don’t have to start wearing a watch to get this back. The watch is just one symbol of the underlying skill. The underlying skill is separating the act of knowing one small thing from the act of being dragged through a thousand other things at the same time.
Leave the phone in another room for an hour. Eat a meal without it in sight. Take a walk with nothing in your pocket. Ask what time it is by looking at a clock on the wall.
You’ll notice, after about twenty minutes, that something has loosened in your head. It’s the specific feeling of your attention being your own again. The watch-wearers live with that feeling more often than the rest of us, which is probably why, when you ask them why they still wear one, all they can say is that they prefer it.