In the 1820s, a London printer bought a watch for five pounds. Then he pawned it.
He bought it back and pawned it again. Then again. More than twenty times, by his count. The same watch had raised more than forty pounds whenever money got tight. A good watch, he said, was a guardian angel when you were hard up.
The historian E. P. Thompson found his account while tracing the arrival of clock-time into working life. In the world Thompson described, the watch was not merely a way to know the hour. It helped divide an employer's time from a worker's own. It synchronized people with machines. It turned labor into something that could be measured, bought, and sold by the hour.
It also became one of the first things a worker bought when his wages improved.
People formed watch clubs, paying into a common pool until each member could take home a timepiece. A watch signaled prosperity and respectability. It could be pawned during a bad week. After a lifetime of service, an employer might give a worker an engraved gold one.
The machine that disciplined his time was also the asset that gave him a little room to survive it.
Thompson called the watch "the poor man's bank."
Nearly two hundred years later, I took off my Apple Watch and started shopping for a mechanical one.
The cheapest honest version
I was trying to pay more attention to my attention.
The Apple Watch had become part of my morning without me noticing the size of its role. I put it on, started a workout, closed the rings, and accumulated another square on a digital calendar of discipline. When I removed it, the workout remained. I still got up and trained. Time remained on every other screen around me.
What disappeared was the ritual.
Within days I was looking at a Hamilton Khaki, a hand-wound field watch that cost around seven hundred dollars. I kept trying to find what I called the cheapest honest version. If the right watch cost less, maybe the desire would become reasonable.
I built an argument around winding it each morning. The ritual would remind me that time is finite. Memento mori. Four thousand weeks. My son is two, which feels both impossibly young and already fast. A watch I had to tend would keep that truth from disappearing into the wallpaper.
The argument was good enough that I almost missed what else I was asking the watch to hold.
Security. Control. Identity. A story about the kind of man wearing it.
The bundle was almost identical to the one inside Thompson's history.
I already own an automatic watch. When I leave it unworn, it stops, and I have to set it again. I already own a watch that marks my marriage, one that marks my son's first birthday, and a Bulova I bought during our babymoon. I bought a new strap for the Bulova so it would work better as an everyday watch. The practical problem was solved.
I kept shopping.
The only lever
I know why security is easy to sell me.
I stepped away from the work I had been doing during COVID after burning out. I moved into sales, learned a new industry from another seat, and then lost that job in a restructuring.
The choices afterward all looked like returns to roads I already knew. Go back. Try management. Stay in sales. The job I have now was not on the map.
It came from people who had watched me work.
They had seen me combine knowledge from one part of my career with the operational habits I had learned in another. I could investigate a failure, follow the data, communicate across groups, and understand what the work felt like to the person doing it. Fifteen years of moving through different seats had produced a combination I did not know how to name until someone else needed it.
When the job disappeared, another income stream did not save me. Work I had already done opened a door I had not planned for.
That is evidence. It still has not quieted the part of me trying to build a backup.
I have met that part of myself before.
When my wife was pregnant, there was not one ounce of it I could take off her. Comfort, words of affirmation, being present—that was the whole list. So I went to Home Depot.
Constantly.
I tore the carpet off the stairs, learned what board and batten was halfway through installing it, built a library into the living room, and turned the garage into a workshop. People call it nesting. It was the only lever I could reach. She was doing the impossible part, so I made the house worth bringing him home to.
The project has changed. The response has not.
When I cannot control what will happen, I build something I can tend.
Another mechanism
I have spent years circling a business. Consulting. Products. Some way to turn what I know into income that does not depend on one employer.
When I ask what ownership promises me, the answer is security and control. I can hear the contradiction while I say it. Entrepreneurship is risk. Independent work may give you more control over when and how you work, but it also hands you the costs, the volatility, and every problem that used to belong to an employer.
The risk is part of what attracts me. I want my children to see me go first. One day I will tell them to do things they are afraid of, to take the risk, to go anyway. I know it will matter less what I tell them than what they catch me doing. I do not want to hand them that instruction with nothing of my own to show for it.
I want to provide more than I had growing up. I want to find out what is on the other side of my own doubt.
Those are honest motives.
So is the anxiety.
The job I have now already gives me something I say I am building toward: flexibility. I work from home. I can be there for breakfast, daycare, and a slow Tuesday when my son decides a stroller is the correct place to store gravel. But my wife and I have a phrase for the moments when my body is with the family and my mind is somewhere inside a business I have not built yet: turquoise water.
It means I have left the room without going anywhere.
That is the part the backup plan has not answered. I want to build something that protects my family's future. Building it can take me away from their present. The attempt to own more of my time becomes another mechanism that must be wound.
I wish I could say the answer is to stop reaching and appreciate what I have. That is clean, and some days it may even be right. But it leaves out ambition, uncertainty, the pleasure of building, and the fact that jobs really do disappear.
Maybe I am trying to provide. Maybe I am trying to leave a legacy. Maybe I am trying to turn fear into a project because projects are easier to manage than fear.
The honest answer is that I don't know yet.
This morning, the automatic watch I already owned had stopped again. I set it, put it on, and went back to work. I still have not bought the Hamilton. I still look.