My grandfather owned one watch his entire life. A Timex. He wound it every morning before his coffee, and when he died, it still worked. That watch cost him eleven dollars in 1968.
Last week, a man in Dallas paid $10.7 million for a Rolex.
Not a watch. A *statement*. A "Rolex Perpetual"—one of the self-winding Oyster Perpetuals that Rolex has been churning out since 1931, now fetching seven figures at auction because the dial has the right shade of blue and the case has the right provenance. The buyer, a private collector who wished to remain anonymous, told the auction house he plans to keep it in a bank vault in Geneva. He will never wear it.
He will never wind it. He will never know what time it is.
This is where we are as a society. We have taken the most democratic invention in human history—the ability to know the hour—and turned it into a trophy that sits in the dark, appreciating in value while the world outside burns.
The "Perpetual" name is a lie in plain sight. Rolex trademarked it in 1931 to describe a rotor that winds the mainspring using the motion of your wrist. It doesn't run forever. It runs as long as you do. It's a beautiful piece of engineering—genuinely. The Oyster Perpetual is a marvel of miniaturization, an object that converts the twitch and swing of a human arm into stored energy. It is, in its way, a metaphor for work: you move, it lives.
But somewhere along the line, we stopped wearing watches and started hoarding them.
The Rolex Perpetual has become a financial instrument. Auction houses now report that luxury watch sales have tripled in five years. A stainless steel Daytona—a watch designed for race car drivers who needed to time laps—sells for more than a house in most American cities. And the people buying them? They're not race car drivers. They're investors. They're men who talk about "liquidity" and "store of value" and "portfolio diversification" while their neighbors can't afford a $400 emergency.
Meanwhile, the actual function of a watch—to tell time—is free. Your phone does it. Your microwave does it. The dashboard of your car does it. The Rolex Perpetual doesn't do anything your $30 Casio can't do, except signal to other wealthy people that you belong.
And here's the part that gnaws at me: we used to admire craftsmanship because it served a purpose. A well-made watch kept you on time for work, for dinner, for the birth of your child. The precision mattered. Now the precision is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the resale value.
We are a country that has decided that the best thing you can do with a beautiful, useful object is to lock it away and wait for it to become more valuable than when you bought it. We have turned time itself into an asset class.
My grandfather's Timex is in a drawer somewhere. It still works. It still tells time. It still cost eleven dollars.
The man in Dallas spent $10.7 million on a watch he'll never wear. He doesn't own a piece of time. He owns a receipt. And somewhere, the ghost of a Swiss watchmaker is weeping.
**The point isn't that Rolex makes bad watches. The point is that we've stopped valuing things for what they do and started valuing them for what they're worth. When a tool becomes a trophy, the tool dies. And so, slowly, does the culture that made it.**