Column: When the display goes dark – That is why the mechanical watch will survive once again

When the world becomes more digital by the second, when time is soon projected into our eyes instead of onto our wrists, then the most human thing we have, the mechanical watch, will once again survive. Because when technology becomes invisible, the real becomes sacred.

Text: Andreas Johansson

I remember my first digital watch. A little black Casio with a rubber strap, neon-green backlight and a button that made me feel like James Bond. It could show the time in two time zones, count down and even play a melody. I was eight or nine years old and convinced that I was wearing the future on my wrist. And maybe I was, at least for a while. Because the digital watch was for a long time the symbol of progress. It was faster, cheaper, more exact. The mechanical watch on the other hand? A leftover from grandfather's time, full of cogs and oil and strangely romantic terms like “power reserve”.

But time, ironically enough, has a fantastic sense of irony. Because everything suggests that the very technology that once threatened to wipe out mechanics is now itself facing its own process of extinction. And it will happen earlier than most people think.

Technology becomes invisible

Look around you. Few people wear digital watches in the classic sense any more. They wear smartwatches. And even those, despite their popularity, are already on their way out. Technological development is no longer about making the gadgets on our body smarter, but about making the body itself smart. In 10–15 years we will probably have AR glasses that project the time into our field of vision, contact lenses with microdisplays and haptic signals that let us feel time passing. Why look at a screen when the world itself can show what time it is? When time can be conveyed through sound, light or feeling, the digital display becomes as outdated as the CD or the GPS in the glove compartment. The digital watch was never the final stop, just an intermediate phase.In fifty years historians will describe the digital watch as a parenthesis in our relationship with technology. It began with fascination over numbers and ended with information exhaustion. We went from thinking it was magical to watch seconds tick down, to desperately trying to switch off notifications about email, pulse and reminders to drink water. As technology becomes ever more integrated, we will stop looking at it. The digital watch is not dying because it fails, but because it becomes superfluous.

Left on the wrist – something that ticks

And then, in the middle of the invisible, the mechanical watch will be standing there. As unnecessary as ever. As beautiful as never before. Because it is precisely the unnecessariness that makes it necessary. When everything else blends into everyday life we need something real. Something that weighs, ticks, lives. An object that does not need to be charged overnight or updated to version 12.3. I think the mechanical watch's next big upswing begins in about 15 years, when the generation that grew up entirely digitally starts longing for the physical. First as a niche, then as a culture. A resistance against the invisible.

The digital watch was a tool. The mechanical watch is a language. It says something about who you are, not just what the time is. When the world becomes algorithmic people will look for rituals that remind them of the human. Winding your watch every morning is one such ritual, a small act that literally sets the day in motion. It is analogue mindfulness. I think the mechanical watches of the future will not only be status symbols, but symbols of self-determination. A way of showing that not everything has to be connected, logged or made efficient.

When the displays go dark

Technology's cycles move faster than ever. Quartz watches reigned for 20 years. The smartwatches have now had their decade. If history repeats itself, the digital era on the wrist will be over around the year 2040. By then the screens will have moved into our eyes, our walls and our voices. And what remains on the wrist is no longer technology but tradition. Not because the mechanical watch is better. But because it is more beautiful. More human. More timeless, literally speaking. Maybe that is why I still wind my watch every morning, not because I have to, but because I want to feel that time actually passes, tick by tick. Because when everything else goes quiet, that little sound of metal and time is the most human thing there is.