If you follow me on Instagram, or if you know me in the real world, you’re probably aware that I’m currently in the uncomfortable but exciting process of packing up my life into a neverending series of cardboard boxes, destined for a moving truck. After several years of becoming far too well acquainted with members of the Amtrak Acela crew, I’ve decided to put those relationships on hold, and relocate to New York City. I signed a lease on a too small, too expensive Brooklyn apartment, and I honestly cannot wait to live in it. It’ll be a great opportunity to work more closely with my Worn & Wound colleagues who I see primarily in Google Meet windows and fleetingly on my office visits and to experience the watch industry from the center of it in the United States. It’ll also be fun to finally have a direct flight to Geneva (and so many other places – I will not miss you Logan International) and to have access to any kind of dumpling whenever I want. 

But moving itself is not fun, and as I’ve gone through the mental and now very real exercise of figuring out what to keep and take with me, sell or give away, discard to the dumpster, or store temporarily in my childhood home with my very kind parents, I’ve thought a lot about collecting, the stuff we acquire, and how it shapes us and moves with us (or not) through life. 

It goes without saying, I hope, that my watches are coming with me. They are small and easy to transport, and while I’ve sold a handful of pieces that fall into the category of “I forgot I had this” to friends to defray moving costs, I never considered a wholesale purge. 

That said, this move has put into stark focus the brutal problem all of us face in the watch hobby, which is the albatross around our necks that is the closet full of presentation boxes that will be familiar to so many reading this. Feel free to guess in the comments how many medium sized moving boxes I filled with these things. It’s truly absurd. We have to do better. 

Cleaning out my Concord apartment, the real decision making is all related to the enthusiast pursuits I entered it with. I’ve lived here for (oh jeez…) nearly 13 years. A long time! When I moved into this apartment, I was a beginner watch collector, which is to say I had some watches, and I liked watches, but I was not part of the enthusiast community around the hobby yet. I read Hodinkee and Worn & Wound and other sites, but they weren’t my first stop in the morning like they’d be later on, and I was probably just barely getting into the forums at that point. 

Thirteen years ago, the collecting bug manifested itself inside of me with attempts to acquire as much physical media as possible. Movies and music, the first enthusiast rabbit holes of my life, were opportunities to collect DVDs and Blu-Rays, and CDs and vinyl records, in an obsessive way that makes watch collecting, at least the way I do it, feel sedate. 

Over the years, like so many others, my viewing and listening habits changed as streaming became more omnipresent. I decided early on that I just wouldn’t need to haul all of that plastic with me to New York. In a smaller living space, I think I’ll be happy not to have to find room for shelves of discs. 

But the records – the records are giving me fits.

I had told myself I wouldn’t bring my records to Brooklyn with me. I’ll take the space, again, and make the move a little more streamlined. But as I was pulling them off their shelves and putting them into boxes destined for storage, I began to get nostalgic. 

When I put these records on those shelves for the first time, I worked in higher education and never could have dreamed about a future in the watch industry. They’ve sat there as I built one life, then dismantled it, then built another. Some of these records have been with me for over twenty years. Not just across apartments, but stages of life. Jobs, girlfriends, and of course my taste in music is charted here explicitly. My jazz phase. Every Tom Waits album. That stretch where I was buying literally everything Temporary Residence was putting out.  

Going through my records had the effect of making me feel like a beginner watch collector again. Collecting music has been a part of my life for a longer period of time, and while I certainly have made connections to and bonded with a great many watches in my collection, the connection I have to a lot of these albums feels more mature somehow. And what’s spooky is that it feels that way even without the music itself. Having possession of the physical objects is special on its own. 

The record that means the most to me is probably my copy of Radiohead’s In Rainbows, in the original, limited edition “Disc Box” configuration. It’s my favorite Radiohead album. I’ll never forget the experience of receiving it in the mail in a big cardboard box from England and discovering the artwork and insanely cool packaging as the album unfolded on my cheap Audio-Technica turntable connected to some similarly cheap bookshelf speakers from Best Buy. Knowing that this record was mastered so well (and just that I loved it and wanted to hear it in its best possible quality) probably inspired me to gradually upgrade all of my equipment, a project that took years, and (like any collection) is never really complete. Whenever I’d pick up a new piece of equipment, this is the record I’d put on to test it. I know every note and how it should sound. 

And I can’t imagine living somewhere without Bob Dylan’s “Original Mono Recordings” in my household. Just like it says on the tin, this is a box set of Dylan’s first eight albums in mono, issued in 2010 in a lavish box set on CD and vinyl (I have both, of course). The set of LPs is a beautiful object, with heavyweight vinyl records and all of the original artwork painstakingly reproduced. It’s rare, too, and highly sought after by record nerds, though I could never bring myself to sell it. If you ask me my favorite artist, on most days I’m likely to say Bob Dylan, and this set is a historical document that I’d be crazy to leave behind. Right? 

There are so many more. Indie rock records bought on pure Pitchfork hype, weird 1970s prog from the dollar bin at my local shop, even weirder 1970s prog from Brazil that was definitely not from the dollar bin but actually quite expensive and bought blind based on recommendations or the reputation of the label. There are “Record Store Day” limited editions, bought on sunny April mornings at the original Newbury Comics in the Back Bay in the earliest years of that tradition, and pressings of Fleetwood Mac and Paul Simon records stolen from my parents’ basement. They’ll never miss them, I thought in my 20s when I was just starting my collecting. To this day, I don’t think they have. It’s possible, I think, that at this point I’ve had some of those records on my shelf longer than they did. 

Something that has become clear to me over time is that the records explain the watches. One was a bridge to the other, and looking backward, it’s easy to see parallels in how I think about owning this stuff. For example, presentation matters. I think of myself as a design oriented watch collector – I’m aesthetics first, always. With records, I always prized gatefold jackets with expansive artwork, and I fully admit to being a sucker at times for colored vinyl, a trend that was really at its peak when I was deepest into the hobby. 

There’s a more direct connection between these two collecting pursuits, too. They are connected in their obsolescence and the charm that comes from their anachronism in a world of streaming. A single device can replace your turntable and your watch. But if you’ve spent time in either hobby, you know that there’s pleasure in the ritual. Winding a watch, cleaning a record and dutifully flipping it from side A to B. These things connect us deeply to the objects and the art in a way that feels real even if it’s difficult to explain. When you do it long enough, it becomes harder to give up, even as it becomes easier to replace. 

And just like the records, I’ve come to develop a kind of schmaltzy sentimentality for at least some of my watches that I’ve resisted for a long time. I’ve talked about it on the podcast recently, but I’ve accepted that I’m no longer emotionally detached from these things, which was a weird point of pride for me for years. That was never the case for me with music, which is inherently emotional, tied to people and moments from our lives, and a spark for memory and meaning that is well understood by just about everyone. Watches, of course, are as well. But it’s taken me a while to fully embrace it, whereas with music, particularly the massive physical representation of it that is a vinyl LP, it’s fairly obvious. 

Am I doomed, then, to haul these things around with me everywhere I land from here on out? I guess I probably am. And that’s why I’m currently shopping around for an inexpensive turntable and simple powered speakers to have a little place to play these things when I settle in Brooklyn next month. Every new chapter across my entire adult life has involved carrying these records with me, connecting what came before to what happens next. It wouldn’t be simplifying my life to eliminate the hundreds of pounds of music in awkward boxes from my move. It would be erasing a big chunk of it.