i’m less concerned with the loss of an aesthetic and more concerned with a transformation around how time is perceived entirely. when we made the shift from sundials to 12 hour clocks, it was part of an industrial revolution that saw the workers go from taking life day by day with a greater degree of flexibility to highly regimented and dehumanizing subsegments of time. now we’ve gone from the largest unit of time we display being 12 hours to 1 hour. we feel a constant state of disconnection from the moments that got us to this moment and a lack of concern about the future moments as our environments are further degraded.

i’m less worried about millenials, gen z, and gen alpha not liking rolexes than i am about our constantly grinded down state of being. we percieve time differently than the generations that came before us and it makes us feel isolated and like everything is moving too fast. and much of the wisdom about how to transition from a colonial society to a post colonial society is to collectively slow down and i don’t know how capable we are of that as we lose the slow sweeping hour hand displaying a fractional time rather than a number constantly climbing but always displaying an exact timestamp rather than a set of portions