It Does Exactly What I Need

I’ve recently been wearing a Casio AE-1200. I had a familiar model in my teens, lost it, then bought this a decade later in the tail end of the pandemic.

It’s a solid digital watch. Subtle, snazzy. But above all else it’s cheap and practical, filled to the brim with more features than a simple digital watch ever needs:

• Day & date tracking
• 5 alarms
• Hourly notification toggle
• Stopwatch + countdown timer
• World time / timezone library
• A bonus quasi-analogue display
• Dinky little lights

It was nigh-perfect. I later added a screen protector and replaced the arm hair pulling nylon strap with an old spare NATO one and bam, perfection.

Unfortunately I didn’t use it much. Even with a screen protector I risked damaging it at work, and I always had a phone by my side which had all the functionality of the watch, so I put it away in my big box of trinkets.

And then I recently had a need to track time. Sure my phone could do it, but it was a massive faff to repeatedly set up and check¹. So I dug out my watch and it’s been on me ever since.

And then one day on a whim I look up the watch online to see what others think.

It turns out the AE-1200 is popular for all the reasons I mentioned. It’s dubbed the ‘Casio Royale’ due to its resemblance to the Seiko watch used in… Octopussy? Close enough. And then I fall down a deeper rabbit hole: watch modding.

There’s an entire community, hell an entire industry out there dedicated to modifying watches, and the AE-1200’s cheap price & unique look makes it a prime candidate. It’s neat to see what people turn the watch into, and I find myself pulled deeper…. Some even put tiny compasses on the straps!

I immerse myself in everything watch modding. Coloured films, custom cases, inverted displays. People even fill their watches with oil to improve the clarity of the watch and to make it more water resistant. I find myself fascinated, obsessed, spare time spent watching modding tutorials and scouring the web for spare parts for the perfect build.

I was caught by Hobby Pull. Or at least, that’s what I call it². That nebulous draw towards a random hobby or interest which suddenly infatuates you, a great gravitational mass drawing you closer and closer until you frankly obsess over it.

While I’m no sociologist, I find that this pull is more effective when the hobby/criteria meets the following criteria:

• It is related to something you’re already connected to.
• It has niche/unique application. Often the smaller it is, the more alluring it is.
• It is presented in, and reinforced by a specific dedicated community.

I know this is how acquiring hobbies work, the novelty of it grabs your attention. But I’m on about when it suddenly consumes you - something that happens.

Considering the amount of hobbies presented online as “buy and collect as much of this as possible”, how these communities prop up a consumerist in-group with positive feedback loops of acquisition & support, and how there are people with much worse impulse control than me… I find it concerning how easy it is to get drawn in.

For me, my way out was sudden. Neck deep in discussion with a friend about what I could do to spice up my watch, I said that ultimately that “it does exactly what I need”. Yes I could make it look great, but the important part was that the watch performed all its functions, and simply saying that helped it click³.

Really the modifications I made when I was unaware of this subculture were enough. The screen protector and replacement strap served purpose over aesthetics. I didn’t need anything else.

Now I’m not going to say that this epiphany is the perfect fix, nor do I want to discredit those who turn watches into a canvas. I ultimately know that a negative display & green filter would look sick on this bad boy and I still find myself browsing eBay in the evening but… I can do without it. The watch fills my needs, and that’s enough.