The Daily Wind

A weird discussion about ticking sounds, winding rituals, and authenticity

Earlier this year I bought a C6 by Romain Gauthier - I wrote about it here. One of the things I noted in that essay was how the titanium construction and open-worked dial give the watch an unexpectedly loud personality. Most mechanical watches tick with some degree of audibility, but this particular piece kinda ‘announces’ every second with a clarity that seems to cut through ambient noise persistently.

I notice it a lot during video calls, when I sit with my fingers propped against my cheek as I listen to what’s being said - and given I spend a decent fraction of my days in video calls, consciously listening to this watch ticking has now become a major part of my life. Today¹ I was in a particularly boring meeting, and as I listened to this watch ticking, it triggered a bunch of interesting thoughts about my relationship with time, rituals, and analogue totems… Allow me to walk you through some of these thoughts.

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I need to take you on a journey first. While most mechanical watches produce some audible ticking sound, for the most part we’ve trained ourselves to ignore these sounds in the same way we’ve all learned to filter out urban noise, notification chimes, and the constant hum of all the things around us as we go about living our lives. The clarity of my C6’s ticking, however, feels like it is insisting on my acknowledgement of each passing second.

This made me consider the alternative (or ‘normal’ situation when I wasn’t wearing a C6) - which is that the appreciation of time has gradually been eliminated from our daily experiences. When we sit in silence as opposed to having some reminder of time passing, time is transformed from something we can feel and hear, into something we simply consult and dismiss.

And so, continuously hearing my watch revealed how completely I had embraced the abstraction of time. When I first got the watch, every audible tick was a bit of an unwelcome reminder that time was a physical process unfolding in real time, which is very different from what most people see when they look at their watches… I’d guess most people see their watch as a source of ‘static information’.

I tend to have a fairly predictable routine, so the time of day when I wind my watch is quite consistent. As it happens, the C6 takes around ten turns of the crown; rarely nine, sometimes eleven, but around ten is when I have become used to feeling the crown stiffen up… at which point it has had enough, and “wants to be left alone to unwind in peace.” Which is exactly how I feel at the end of the day when I take it off! It’s the most cringe-worthy minute of my day, because I now have this brief but weird moment of ‘understanding’ with my manually wound watch. Anyway…

I usually read and hang out with my kids right after doing this, and one time my son was watching me do this and asked a fairly obvious question: “Don’t you get watches that wind themselves?”

Well, yeah. Why would we choose inefficiency when perpetual movements exist? Why should we embrace daily maintenance when self-winding mechanisms eliminated this inconvenience ages ago? Well, as it happens, this ritual serves purposes which extend far beyond timekeeping as a functional endeavour!

We’re living in an optimisation-obsessed culture, and frankly, the act of manually powering a watch feels like a small act of resistance in a time of widespread digitally-assisted convenience. In this case, we could argue that the C6’s price tag has nothing to do with timekeeping utility and everything to do with purchasing a ticket to access something which feels ritualistic. Each component, from the hand-engraved finger bridges to the utilitarian snail cam, could serve as material evidence of human labour and craftsmanship in an economy that is marching towards complete automation.

Don’t get me wrong, this has nothing to do with conspicuous consumption; it’s more like conspicuous presence. The daily-wind routine ends up being like a meditation practice. The audible ticking is like the ‘stand up’ reminders on an Apple Watch except the ticking provides mindfulness cues instead. The substantial financial investment is of course how we justify treating a simple watch as a philosophical totem; not that watch collectors ever cared about justifying anything, but this is part of our warped psychological make-up.

What I am saying is, maybe we are not buying watches as much as we are buying permission to perform ‘intentional living’ in ways which feel authentic (as opposed to some BS prescribed by wellness apps and productivity gurus).

Maybe, but hold that thought.

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What about smartphones? Well, these tend to fragment our attention using well-designed addiction mechanisms. Mechanical watches, in contrast, require voluntary focus. The daily wind is a mandatory pause in our speedy existence. The audible ticking provides a constant, almost rhythmic, anchor in a notification-saturated environment.

Ok, cool story bro. But can this apparent virtue be viewed from a different perspective? Maybe there’s a simpler explanation; people like us, in 2025, now have such anxiety about ‘authentic experiences’ and have become so alienated from physical processes that suddenly, merely winding a watch manually can feel revolutionary. Have we really digitised ourselves to the point where just hearing the passage of time sounds profound instead of ordinary?

Maybe not.

Has it ever occurred to you, that your attention will determine the value you derive from a watch? The way I see it, every moment I spend admiring the C6’s craftsmanship, every second I spend winding and setting it, every instance of noticing the ticking sound - these things combined, make up the product I purchased.

Technically we may be buying a watch for its timekeeping functionality; but aside from the brand value, social status, and ‘cultural capital’ value we get from ownership… we are ultimately buying attention-capture mechanisms which feel meaningful (as opposed to manipulative).

This is opposite of smartphones!

Our phones tend to forcibly extract our attention through nefariously engineered compulsion - mechanical watches instead reward our focus using aesthetic pleasure and ritual satisfaction. To me, this difference feels morally significant i.e. voluntary versus involuntary attention engagement.

Isn’t that funny? The daily demands of a mechanical watch - winding, setting, and in my case acknowledging its loud ticking - are basically a case study in “buying inconvenience as luxury experience.” 😂

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This isn’t surprising at all, if you think about the bigger picture. Everything can be automated, optimised, and streamlined nowadays, and as a result, people end up paying premium prices for products that deliberately require effort and attention. Manual transmissions in sports cars. Vinyl records that demand physical handling. Mechanical watches that need daily input.

Same sh1t, different package.

Maybe this has nothing to do with nostalgia at all, and everything to do with anxiety about the disappearance of tactile engagement with physical objects. Since we’ve gone and digitised so much of our daily lives, perhaps we’ve finally reached that point where manual processes are starting to feel exotic instead of ordinary. Let’s not forget, many of us still have memories of the pre-digital world… imagine what this might feel like to a kid who was born into a world which already had the iPad?

Anyway, after a couple of months of daily interaction with the C6, I’ve begun to recognise its most subversive quality: the refusal to disappear into the background as a mere functional object! I’ve written about how luxury purchases tend to eventually become invisible through habituation or ‘baseline reset’; expensive cars become another mode of transport, designer clothing becomes your wardrobe, and even complicated watches can eventually fade into providing you with routine timekeeping utility.

So my point is that the C6’s louder ticking seems to prevent this normalisation for me. Each tick represents the watch demanding acknowledgement, and it thus forces continued awareness of its existence (and of course, my decision to wear it). This persistence ends up transforming the watch from a passive accessory into an active participant in my daily life.

Granted, whether this constitutes some kind of profound engagement with “temporal authenticity” or just an expensive and annoying object depends largely on one’s tolerance for performed mindfulness!

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Tonight, I will be going out for dinner, so I will not perform the ten-turn ritual that has become both a genuine pleasure and a subconscious performance of values I’m not entirely sure I hold. Then, my C6 will tick through the night, track moments while I sleep, and be ready tomorrow to demand another day of my attention and care.

Maybe that’s the most honest lesson I’ve learned from the watch so far - in our current state of culture, the line between authentic experience and purchased performance has become so blurred that it might as well be meaningless. We buy objects which help us live with the values we wish we embodied naturally, and in doing that, we end up creating genuine experiences, but through artificial means!

The mechanical watch industry really has perfected this contradiction, in that they offer expensive solutions to problems created by the very affluence which makes these purchases possible². We wind our watches religiously while checking our phones compulsively, and in doing so we are performing temporal mindfulness while living lives of constant distraction.

Maybe it’s time for a different approach?

1. Not literally today, but on the day I typed that. I felt compelled to add this footnote when I was reviewing before posting - that was literally, today. 😂

2. In case this contradiction isn’t clear, let me walk you through it:

• The lifestyles of people who can afford luxury watches include constant connectivity, they are digitally overwhelmed, and they lack authentic experiences… this creates problems for them.

• The watch industry sells expensive watches as solutions to these problems by promising authentic experiences, mindfulness, connection to tradition and so on.

• But the people buying these watches don’t actually change their underlying behaviour!

• They perform the ritual of mindful watch-winding but continue to live distracted, digitally-dominated lives.

• So essentially, it’s a form of purchased virtue-signalling rather than representing a genuine lifestyle change.