Watch Me

Time controls everything. Time is the ultimate controller of us all.

It controls the day moving forward. It controls what we do, where we go, when we leave, when we arrive, when we work, when we eat, and when we sleep. Time tells us when dinner is, when the concert starts, when the movie begins, when the bus is coming, and when we are supposed to be somewhere. We organize our entire lives around it. We set alarms to wake up, timers to remind us, calendars to plan ahead, and clocks to tell us how much time we have left.

For as long as I can remember, I have always worn a watch. There was something comforting about having the time right there on my wrist. I didn’t have to search for a clock or ask someone what time it was. I could simply look down and know.

Sometimes I would forget my watch, and on those days I would feel an almost ridiculous amount of anxiety. I would find myself constantly looking for a clock, checking the time even though only a few seconds had passed since the last time I looked. Without realizing it, I had become dependent on this little object on my wrist to tell me where I was in the day or how many more minutes do I need to spend in Math class.

Over the years, I’ve had all kinds of watches. I’ve had simple ones and really nice ones. I’ve had a Swiss Army watch, and I’ve had the cheap fifteen-dollar watches where you could actually hear the ticking as I tried to fall asleep. Those watches had a strange charm to them. The ticking sounded almost like a tiny bomb counting down, reminding you that every second was disappearing.

I’ve had watches with glow-in-the-dark hands that would light up an alien green in the middle of the night. I remember looking at them when my alarm was about to go off, hoping I could somehow squeeze out another five minutes of sleep. That little green glow would tell me exactly how much time I had left.

Then I watched Spy Kids. I remember seeing the watches in the movie and thinking, Wow. They have everything on their watches! That’s so cool. They weren’t just watches. They were communication devices, tracking devices, gadgets, and tools for solving problems. At the time, it seemed completely futuristic. It was the kind of technology that belonged in a movie, not in everyday life. Little did I know that we would eventually become the Spy Kids without even realizing it.

Our watches can show us messages and phone notifications. We can answer calls, communicate with other people, track our location, monitor our heart rate, count our steps, measure how far we ran, track how fast we swam, monitor our sleep, and record countless details about our bodies and our daily lives. We can even use them to find our phones.

Something that once seemed like science fiction has quietly become completely normal. And it doesn’t stop with watches. Technology keeps getting smaller, more personal, and more integrated into our lives. We now have smart glasses and smart rings. Instead of technology being something we sit in front of, technology is becoming something we wear. It is becoming part of us.

I love my Garmin watch because, from a distance, it can look like an ordinary watch. It doesn’t necessarily scream, I am a computer on your wrist. It lacks the square look that an apple watch has. But the moment I touch the screen, it comes alive. I can choose activities, track workouts, see notifications, monitor my body, and look at data that would have seemed impossible to have access to just a few years ago, barely decades.

And yet, the most interesting thing about all of this is that the one thing the watch is always showing me is the same thing watches have shown us for hundreds of years: Time. No matter how advanced the technology becomes, the clock is still there as a reminder that every minute is precious.

We have built incredible technology around time, but we still haven't escaped time itself. In fact, technology may have made us even more aware of it. We count our steps, our heartbeats, our sleep, our workouts, our productivity, our deadlines, and our minutes. We measure how long we spend doing something and how much time we have left to do it.

The watch has gone from simply telling us the time to telling us almost everything about ourselves.

Maybe that is what makes the evolution of the watch so fascinating. What started as a simple device that answered one question — What time is it? — has become a tiny computer capable of answering hundreds of questions about our lives.

How far did I run?

How fast was my heart beating?

How long did I sleep?

Where am I?

Who is trying to reach me?

What should I be doing next?

And, of course:

How much time do I have left?

When I think back to watching Spy Kids and seeing those futuristic watches, I realize how strange it is that the future eventually became ordinary. What once seemed impossible is now sitting on my wrist while I go about my everyday life.

We dreamed about technology becoming smaller and more powerful, and it did. We imagined having everything at our fingertips, and now we have it on our wrists.

But perhaps the strangest part is that, despite all of our technological progress, we are still controlled by the same thing we have always been controlled by.

Time. The watch may have become smarter, but time hasn't changed. It still moves forward. It still tells us when to wake up, when to leave, when to work, when to eat, when to sleep, and when to stop.

We may have turned our watches into tiny computers, but underneath all that technology is still a ticking clock, quietly reminding us that every second is passing.

And maybe that is the most futuristic thing about the watch after all: it doesn't just tell us what time it is.

It reminds us that we are running out of it.