I’ve been thinking of getting rid of my Apple Watch for a while. Before the days of smartwatches, I was a bit of a connoisseur of various watches, many being made by Casio. I was one of the guys in class back in the mid 1980s whose watch would “beep beep” at the top of the hour just as the classroom clock minute hand moved to the “12” on the dial. Several of us had watches that beeped in sync like that, and every morning during homeroom we’d sync our digital watches to the school clock system. I can confidently say I was not alone in that endeavor.
Fast forward 40 years and I’ve grown quite bored with my Apple Watch, it being just an extension of my iPhone and all of its notifications. I’ve been feeling the urge to be less connected to the online chaos and I have always found my Apple Watch a little too “delicate” looking for my tastes.
Earl and I were strolling through Dillard’s yesterday when I noticed they had a fantastic sale on a Casio G-SHOCK watch I’ve had my eye on for a while: the Casio G-SHOCK GW9500. I bought the version with the negative LED display, in a fantastic military green.
The GW9500 feels awesome on my wrist. Features include a built-in compass, barometer, altimeter, and temperature sensors, as well as Atomic Clock sync and solar charging. The display also comes with a backlight. I’ve noticed the negative LED display is a little dimmer than I expected, but it works perfectly fine for my needs.
With all of the health tracking the Apple Watch does, and the gamification of fitness with closing rings, I realized how addicted I had become to seeing those little fitness rings fill up each day with my steps and the like. Akin to “likes” and the equivalent on social media, my Apple Watch was feeding into a dopamine addiction, something super prevalent throughout today’s society.
I’ve been making a serious effort to break free from this kind of addictive behavior, and the Apple Watch fitness rings ended up feeding that tendency in ways I didn’t even realize at the time. I found this very surprising.
When I went on my walk this morning, I was aware that my new watch was not tracking every heart beart, my iPhone was counting the steps, and there would be no “you closed your exercise ring” notification at the end of the endeavor. Admittedly, this made me feel a bit uneasy or “twitchy”, which is the sign for me of an addiction.
I’m really looking forward to enjoying my new Casio G-SHOCK watch. My health efforts shall continue, and perhaps even in a better way, because now I’ll be working out to the effort of how I feel, and not doing just enough to reach a certain number on my watch.
These digital devices can be sneaky little addiction generators. This is something I’m going to pay closer attention to as I continue my quest to be a little more present in the world around me.
