How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Classic Watch
In January of 2019 I bought a smartwatch, a Garmin vívoactive 3. I bought it during a typical period of “getting fit after a breakup”. And at the time it did wonders for me. I am a person who enjoys seeing numbers and graphs about my life, and having a daily statistic of steps and calories was a big motivation. It made me walk to work instead of taking the public transport. I recorded every run and every bike ride.
Garmin allows automatic syncing of recorded activities to Strava and of course I did that too. The best part of finishing every bike ride was checking out the list of new personal records I beat, and the leaderboard of the local segments. The smartwatch was an important part of my life, and I wore it every waking moment, sometimes even not taking it off for sleep.
That period ended rather abruptly with the pandemic and the first lockdown, and I remember at one point being angry that all my stats would go down because of staying at home. I know how bad that sounds.
The lockdown finished and I was back at pushing the number of steps. I rode my bike much less frequently because of reasons described in the Making my own private Strava blog post, but still, using the smartwatch was an important aspect.
And then… I lost it. I could not find it anywhere, I searched the whole flat, the garden, the car, even the basement but it was nowhere to be found. After some mental investigations I came to a conclusion that I must have put in some bag that I later emptied to a trash bin. I was bummed out, but also at that time I did not want to spend a lot of money on a new watch, as I had higher priority spendings on the horizon.
In the meantime I got interested in old 80s watches, and on a whim I bought a CASIO F-91W, a classic watch that tells the time and is so famous it has its own Wikipedia page.
A year has passed, I mostly forgot about my smartwatch, and then all of a sudden, in a classic trope of 50s family sitcoms and boomer memes (well, those are the same picture), my wife found my watch where I searched several times and missed it. It was somehow weirdly wedged under the seat of our car.
Rejoice! Again I started counting the steps and making sure I passed some arbitrary threshold each day. I recorded a bike ride with it, and checked out the detailed stats.
It lasted two weeks.
And I lost interest. I could not be bothered witch charging it every two days. And the watch face that I like does not have a battery indicator, so sometimes when I forgot to check it, it would die on my wrist. My mentality regarding privacy also changed and I was not happy with sharing my most personal data with some external servers, that have already at least once been attacked by ransomware.
Another aspect is my current preference to use private, open source software, and with that I would not be able to use Strava anymore. Going back again to my blog post about biking, where I describe my current bike ride logging solution.
And so I am back to my CASIO, which Just Works, tells the time, the date and even the day of the week, and the battery will last for the next decade. It does not have distracting notifications. It is waterproof and even if I manage to break it, buying a new one will not break me financially. I do not need anything else right now.
I think it’s just another example of me being tired of too much technology.
And if I ever need to make an IED, I have the first part.
Thanks for reading!
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