The Free Press
Two weeks ago, the YouTube channel Hodinkee released a video featuring noted Lost actor Daniel Dae Kim, in which he spent 37 uninterrupted minutes talking about. . . buying watches in retail stores.
Not acting, his personal life, or his experience as a Korean-born artist building a career in the United States. Just the purchase and ownership of mass-production wristwatches from various billion-dollar brands. Going into the store, seeing the watches, handing over the credit card—that sort of thing. The video was well-received, with one commenter noting that he “LOVED this conversation. This is what our hobby is all about! Thanks for posting, Hodinkee!”
Which leads to an obvious question for many readers, namely: What, exactly, is “our hobby”?
The most common nineteenth- and twentieth-century idea of “hobby” was as an activity with some room for creative effort, demonstrated physical mastery, or a combination of both. Woodworking, painting, acoustic guitar, Civil War reenactment—that sort of thing. One takes joy first in doing it at all, later in the accomplishment—or perhaps the hope—of doing it well. It’s possible to be bad at a hobby, which is not to say that one does not enjoy it still. Often the goal is to create something unique, or at least individualized. As an example, very few people set out to crochet something identical to what can be bought in the store down the street.
The “hobby” promoted by the Hodinkee YouTube channel and website is something quite different from any of the above. Hodinkee, which raised $40 million in funding and was valued at $100 million for years before its sale to the Watches of Switzerland retail chain in October of last year, is entirely devoted to the purchase and ownership of upscale wristwatches. It’s not a watch-repair hobby site—that would be TimeZone—and it’s not for the people who build their own watches and/or extensively modify them—that’s WatchForum. Rather, Hodinkee is just for people whose lives revolve around the purchase and ownership of brand-new, standard-issue watches from Rolex, Omega, Seiko, and other major brands. The people who engage in and obsess over this behavior don’t call it purchase and ownership, of course. They call it curation.
If you think we hear that word a lot more than we used to, you’re right, because it used to follow just two words—museum or gallery—but is now uncritically applied in newspapers of record to describe people who have strong opinions on basketball shoes from 1983 to 1989. People “curate” their vinyl records, their Funko Pop! dolls, and their wristwatches, too.
Curation is considerably simpler than most traditional hobbies. There might be 20 different skills involved in building a wooden cutting board, but curators need and, indeed, can only have but two: the ability to buy and the ability to choose. The former is measured in dollars, and it determines the scope of your curation. The latter is usually measured in the approval of others within the “hobby,” and it determines your curation’s makeup. You don’t need to actually use the things you buy—in many cases, this detracts from their resale value. Ownership is the ostensible point, and that exciting frisson of purchase is the hit that keeps the marks coming back for more.
The most notorious curators, especially in the male-centric interests of watches, firearms, and sports cars, are finance people, who are highly compensated but can’t make time for traditional, effort-intense hobbies. Curation can be done via the web while you attend a meeting or wait for an email. You need not leave your job to participate. When you do eventually get home, a simple picture of what you’ve bought will get you the requisite kudos on social media, at which point you can put the item in question away and get back to work.
While not quite a religion, curation does have priests of a sort in the hobby influencers whose entire social media persona revolves around receiving free things from sponsors and gushing about said items on camera. It also has a sacrament: the unboxing video in which a brand-new product is unwrapped and removed from its packaging while an unseen narrator offers a running commentary on the quality of the presentation. Sometimes, the object in question is used afterward, but just as often, it is discarded or set aside. After all, the point of the experience is to purchase and then unbox. Anything more would be both unprofitable to the sponsors and beside the point to most of the curators.
Is curation the same as collection? Not according to racing legend and alpha car collector Miles Collier. His landmark—both in the sense of its significance and the actual physical size—book, The Archaeological Automobile, begins by sharply delineating between the historically significant practice of collection and the mere ego exercise of accumulation.
Researching, finding, and restoring an example of every major road-racing Ferrari model to compete during the ’60s? That’s collection. It has a guiding principle, some obvious rules, and a foreseeable end. Buying every brand-new Ferrari and Lamborghini that arrives at your local dealer? That’s accumulation. Collier, whose uncle, Samuel, won the Watkins Glen Sports Car Club of America race in 1949 before dying while leading the 1950 event, is merciless in his contempt for the accumulators, the mere purchasers, the curators. “Sensibility and expertise make the difference between connoisseurship and mere accumulation,” writes Collier. Hoarding, on the other hand, is based, at least in part, he says, on “indiscriminate desire.”
Yet, curation of one form or another appears to be in a dead heat with video games for the title of “Most Commonly Encountered Obsession Among Young American Men.” Both of these non-hobbies are fundamentally soul-sucking. The video game substitutes the imaginary and meaningless for the real world of challenge and accomplishment beyond the screen, while curation offers nothing but a never-ending treadmill of purchase, unboxing, storage, and eventual disposal. In neither of these is anything created, accomplished, or even truly enjoyed. There is nothing but mere consumption, whether it is the purchase of “downloadable content” like a gun that causes its opponents to explode in a shower of confetti in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II or the anticipated arrival of a Rolex Submariner at the local jeweler. There’s something particularly sad about the latter—imagine spending $17,000 or more on a watch designed to survive ocean depths beyond which a mere glimmer of light can reach, unboxing it on TikTok to a chorus of likes and comments, then very carefully putting it back into its box, so you don’t scratch it, ever.
Then it’s back to the email, the meetings, the jobs that can’t be explained to an 8-year-old. It’s a life unleavened by the creative joy of building a table or even playing a bad cover of “Wonderwall” on the acoustic guitar.
Which is not to say that all is lost. The same internet that tirelessly drives the consumption of unworn watches and undriven sports cars also harbors communities of people who build things from scratch, create new forms of music and art, and “mod” everything from computer keyboards to single-engine airplanes. These challenging and often dispiriting passions and pursuits are not as easily undertaken as mere curation, nor do they offer the sort of immediate gratification for which we’ve conditioned at least two generations of young men. But they offer something unavailable in any store: the joy of accomplishment. Spread the word to curators of all sorts, from lonely apartment-dwellers to famous actors: There is more joy in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your purchase-centric philosophy.
Jack Baruth is a Pro/Am race car driver and a former columnist for Road & Track and Wired magazines. He writes the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.
This story originally appeared in the Washington Examiner.