Hello Readers,
I received an ad for this contest in an email the other day:
I clicked the link because why not? What does an additional tracking cookie matter at this point?
The featured watch is a discontinued Rolex Daytona 116500LN, valued at £25,000 / $31,400. That is one serious prize! I don’t trust internet contests, and raffle tickets had to be purchased, so I declined to enter.
Then I considered: even if I won, would I really want to own that watch?
Don’t get me wrong, if I won the Rolex, I would accept it without hesitation. It is worth a considerable amount of money, even though I would owe big taxes on it.
However, I would also accept almost any prize, Rolex or otherwise. A prize is a prize, right? The real question is, would I want to wear a luxury watch?
I doubt it. I would resell it, pay the taxes, and clear half the value.
I can’t imagine wearing a Rolex as an everyday watch. I accept that maybe I’m built differently than many (humble brag alert), an introvert who does little to draw attention to myself. I am also mildly paranoid in general, so I wouldn’t present myself as a target for criminals by flaunting a $30,000 watch at the gas station or grocery store.
I also can’t imagine using the Rolex to impress my neighbors, although it does sound like fun. I could angle the Rolex’s face to reflect the sun into my neighbor’s eyes while he is doing yard work, like we did to our classmates with our Timex watches back in grade school. When he curses and shields his eyes, it would serve as a great icebreaker to scamper over and discuss every facet of my luxury watch with him in great detail. Look, but don’t touch, Kenny…
Putting aside the watch’s value and style, I would be reluctant to wear it because it is of little functional value to me. Take a look at the Rolex picture above: it is an analog watch. It has three large dials on the main face that must be adjusted manually.
Its only functional use is displaying the current time. I would never use the three interior faces. How do I know this? Because I have owned watches that featured multiple sub faces and never looked at them, they just served to make the watch look cool.
Looking cool. Possessing a high value. That is a Rolex. I recognize that those are high priorities for people several pay grades above me.
As a man of the people, I wear a substantially cheaper watch, a Garmin Fenix 7 Sapphire Solar. It is the fifth Garmin I have owned in the past twenty years.
I purchased it last summer for about $400 and should get four to five years of use out of it before a shiny new version is released. Honestly, I could still wear my Garmin 3 (2016) or the Garmin 5 (2020); they both functioned perfectly when I upgraded, but shiny and new are quite compelling, so I upgraded.
The Rolex has only two functions: to look pretty and display the time. The cell phone that is on my person every waking hour keeps perfect time, so there goes the latter function. The Rolex is merely a valuable piece of jewelry.
On the other hand, the Garmin does everything but serve me breakfast in bed. Heart rate monitoring, sleep tracking, steps, floors climbed, respiration, pulse oximetry, Vo2 max, exercise tracking, calories burned, etc. It uses my tracked data to provide sleep, stress, and training readiness scores. It also connects to external data, providing the weather, sunset/sunrise, GPS navigation, calendar events, messaging, music, a credit card wallet, etc. If I misplace my phone, I can activate an alert and find it. As the watch’s name suggests, it harnesses the power of the sun to extend the battery life between charges.
Tragically, nobody gushes over my Garmin watch like they would a Rolex. Its appearance is very low frills and does not turn heads. The only people who ever comment on it are other Garmin owners, because we all belong to a cult (allegedly).
Nobody is going to target me to lift my $400 watch. In five years, I will replace it with a newer version with even more functionality (maybe it will have advanced artificial intelligence capabilities and can offer psychiatric advice; Lord knows I could use that.) And just like every Garmin watch I’ve ever owned, it will run circles around the Rolex in terms of usefulness – because the Rolex is a sparkly piece of jewelry, albeit one with remarkable craftsmanship.
Would I accept one as a prize? Hell yeah! Would I buy one for tens of thousands of dollars? Not a chance...
Take care,