Judging Other People

I don't believe that the following contains any great original insights. On the contrary, I think most of us already know all of the this.

The problem is that, for some reason, many of us, maybe most or almost all of us, seem to constantly forget it. I don't know why that is. But it seems to me it couldn't hurt to try to remind whoever reads this of these few fairly obvious things.

According to an interview I read in the 1980's, Cormac McCarthy said, "When you stop worrying what other people think of you, you have cleared one of the major hurdles in life," or words to that effect. That has always struck me as excellent advice. I'm not sure I've actually cleared that hurdle -- I don't know whether Mr McCarthy has either -- but I strive to clear it.

According to Matthew 7:1, Jesus said, "Judge not." I first heard that one when I was a small child, and I've always thought that it too is good advice.

Let's do a thought-experiment: let's say that there are 26 people who all live on the same block of one-family houses, and let's call them A through Z. 

It may be unusual for someone to judge others by one criterium above all others -- or it may not be unusual at all.  Be that as it may, I think it will help demonstrate my point if we imagine that several of these 26 people judge others primarily by a single measure.

So: A judges the 25 others according to the cars they drive. B judges them by the state of their houses. C judges them by the state of their lawns, and their gardens if the have any, and deducts points for not having a garden. D judges them according to their level of athletic physical fitness and overall physical attractiveness. E judges them just by the hair. F judges them by their clothes and fashion sense. G, a Christian, tries very hard not to judge anyone, in accordance with the verse from Matthew quoted above. H judges them according to the watches they wear, or carry in their pockets in the case of pocket watches, and deducts huge points for neither wearing nor carrying a watch. And I through Z each hardly ever notice the other 25 at all.

The point of the thought-exercise is to demonstrate the folly of worrying what others think of you. A through Z will probably never know very much about how they are judged by their neighbors. And even if they did know, they would see that they are judged differently by different people, making it impossible to impress all of them, and pointless to even try.

If you object that people judge others by a multiplicity of criteria, then that just makes it even harder to impress them all, and even more pointless to even try. Given that you agree that the criteria for judging others varies greatly from one individual to the next. 

Which I think that any reasonable adult would agree. Although I'd try not to judge you for disagreeing.

Wearing More Than One Watch at a Time

The are records of wrist watches having been made as long ago as the late 18th century, and, more likely than not, at some point early in their existence, some people began wearing more than one wristwatch at a time, for fashion reasons or other reasons.

However, the earliest instance of this I have been able to find (keep in mind, I haven't been looking for very long yet) is General Norman Schwarzkopf wearing a watch on either wrist beginning in 1990, at the start of the first Gulf War. Schwarzkopf had one watch set to Baghdad time, the other to Washington, DC time. Since then, wearing two (or more) watches at once has been known in some circles as "doing the Schwarzkopf." Buzz Aldrin, Fidel Castro and Ted Cruz have all been seen doing the Schwarzkopf. I have not yet been able to find any records of Schwarzkopf having asked any of them to stop.

I have done a little bit of searching in online discussion groups devoted to watches where people have asked whether it's okay to wear more than one watch at a time, or whether people will think it looks stupid or what have you. The responses I've seen so far have been overwhelmingly positive, saying, yeah, you be you, wear as many as you want to. Keep in mind, however, that some of the participants in such discussion groups are watch dealers, and that some watch dealers might figure that the more watches someone wears at one time, the more watches they are likely to purchase, and so, they might sometimes encourage wearing more than one watch at a time even if they think it looks really, really stupid.

One comment in one of these discussions said that, although he personally found nothing at all wrong with it, for every one person encouraging you to wear as many watches as you want to, there might be as many as ten judgemental jerks who would question not only your fashion sense, but also your personal and professional competence, if they spotted you wearing more than one watch at a time. My reaction to that is that it seems that the person making the comment might have a bad job where he is surrounded by judgemental creeps, and might be much happier if he made a drastic change to, for instance, a situation where he could wear a whole bunch of watches at once and the people around him would think it was great. One thing I'm absolutely sure about is that the reaction you will get by wearing more than one watch at once will vary greatly according to the kind of people with whom you surround yourself.

In a similar vein: in the course of researching this post, I came across an online article discussing weather a man should wear a watch at all. The author said yes, and he said yes for reasons having to do with peer pressure (also known as fashion) -- he asserted, for example, that nothing looks more desperate than a man fumbling for his cell phone in order to check the time.

It all depends on your point of view: to me, few things seem more desperate and insecure than someone who would worry about others judging him because he used his cell phone to check the time.

I'm so glad that, back in the 1980's, I came across that interview with Cormac McCarthy in which he declared that you have cleared one of the major hurdles in life when you have ceased to worry about what other people think of you. That's solid-gold advice.

Regular readers of this blog know that my position is that the only sensible reason to wear a watch in our present age is because you want to, not because you want to impress anyone else but because you like the watch in question.

Or the watches in question. Maybe you've gotten a new watch recently and you've been wearing the new one, but you starting missing wearing the one you wore previously, so now you wear them both. I say: good for you! Wear a watch on either wrist if you want to. Wear two watches on each wrist if you want to. I am decidedly, emphatically, firmly in the You Be You camp, and I have never sold a watch, and I also have no plans to do so.

I don't follow fashion closely. It was not until I started researching this post -- I started doing that yesterday -- that I discovered that some people who write about ladies' fashion for a living have encouraged ladies to wear more than one watch on a wrist since the early 2010's.

One of the most distinguished writers about men's watches recently wrote a column which began with the assertion that smartwatches really are watches. It wouldn't have occurred to me to argue otherwise, but apparently it has occurred to some people who interact with this particular writer. In any case, it seems to me that the rest of this particular column undercut the point with which it began, because it was all about wearing a conventional watch on one wrist and a smartwatch on the other -- as if there actually were a crucial difference.

My position would be, wear a mechanical watch (or two or three) on each wrist, and carry a few pocket watches in your pockets -- mechanical pockets watches, of course! -- and do the smart watch stuff on your phone. But it's not as if huge crowds of people have been clamoring for my opinion about this sort of thing. Well, maybe after I publish this post.

Maybe you have far, far more interesting things on your mind than watches and are a far wiser person than I.

I think the Trainman in The Marix Revolutions wore about 10 watches on each wrist. But does anybody really know how many it was?