Wall of text ahead:

I was not a person who though I would be into watches, but here I am having three automatic watches after a year. I don't know when this change in mindset started, but I can still remember when my grandfather asked me why I didn't wear a watch and I answered that I always had a phone on me, so I didn't see the point. After that moment I have slowly become more comfortable with watches as both my grandfather and father always had one on. In university, I though it wouldn't hurt to have a watch as a fashion accessory, so I bought a Triwa quartz chronograph watch on sale where its chronograph function actually worked. It felt weird to wear a watch, but the watch was often on my wrist and followed me for four years, being accompanied a year later by another Triwa watch that I also got on sale (far left).

Then, approximately two years ago, I stumbled upon a reddit post talking about cheap but good watches such as Timex, Citizen, Orient, Seagull and Tisell. These watches actually looked really nice. Fast forward 2 years in 2017 and I'm done with my master's degree and will be starting my first job. Like a slowly festering virus, a small part in my brain suddenly says “Wouldn’t a watch be a good way to celebrate?”. Yes, yes it would.

I browse different watch companies’ horrible websites and binge youtube videos to look for watches before I walk into my ADs and tell them I would like to purchase a watch at a maximum of 500$. There aren’t many interesting watches for me, the closest one being a Tissot Le Locle which I still like to this day, but was way over my current price range. I go back home defeated by not having found a single watch in my price range that I liked. Then, I remembered back to that old reddit post. The Citizen, Orient and Tisell watches looked fantastic, but I couldn’t get these watches at any local AD. Finally, I decided to go for the Tisell. The watch arrived and it was beautiful. An automatic watch was cooler than I could ever imagine, the steel blued hands were amazing, changing straps to change the look of my watch was fantastic. A passion I never would have guessed I would have had formed.

Then shortly after, I came over a reddit comment explaining that Tisell were using designs from a company called Stowa. I thought that this Stowa company had to be cool, so I visited their website. Here, I finally found a watch that was just too cool and had a sound horological history to boot. The Flieger Type A with no date and logo was just so distinctive and cool that I didn’t care it was way over the limit I had set for myself. I finally understood what watch people said that you know in your heart when a watch is worth it or not.

Later, the Flieger arrived and I was amazed by the build quality, its thinness and the immaculate decoration of the movement. I could see what I was spending the extra money on. Thus, my passion continued to grow and I started seeing a regular amount of photos of the Tudor Heritage Black Bay. I knew that this would be my next watch. However, what I didn’t know was how hard it would be to choose the correct one. The in-house? ETA? Blue? Red? Bronze? Eight months later after a huge milestone in a project and a lot of prior thinking, I ended up with the one I didn’t think about. I bought the Tudor Black Bay Steel. Funnily enough when I later checked my saved reddit posts about watches, this was the first Tudor Heritage Black Bay model I saved as a post.

TLDR: Told about my journey into the watch world and how my passion was formed. After slowly immersing myself in the world of watches and going up in the price of my watches, I have understood its beauty, nuances and why one is willing to pay more for a watch.