There was a time when reading an analog clock wasn't taught, it was absorbed. You picked it up the way you learned to look both ways before crossing the street. It was simply part of understanding the world.
Now, that assumption is quietly breaking down.
In classrooms across the country, educators have reported that a noticeable percentage of students struggle to read analog clocks. Some schools have even removed them from exam rooms because they caused more stress than clarity. In a recent survey of primary school teachers, a majority reported at least some students entering secondary school unable to reliably tell time from an analog face, not as an exception, but as a growing norm. The issue isn't intelligence. It's exposure. If you grow up surrounded by digital time, on phones, tablets, microwaves, dashboards, then time arrives as a number, not a shape.
That shift has consequences far beyond the classroom.
The Disappearance of Time as a Visual Language
An analog clock is not just a device. It's a visual system.
It teaches proportion. It shows duration. It allows you to see time passing as distance, quarter hours, half hours, the slow sweep toward something. There's a spatial logic to it. A meeting at 3:45 doesn't just exist as digits, it occupies a position on a circle.
Digital time removes that context. It is precise, efficient, and stripped of metaphor. 3:45PM or 15:45 is exact, but it doesn't feel like anything.
For generations raised on screens, time is no longer something you read, but something you check.
And when time stops being visual, the analog watch begins to lose its most basic function.
Born in the Trenches
To understand what's being lost, it helps to remember what the wristwatch actually is and where it came from.
Before the First World War, the wristwatch barely existed. The pocket watch was standard, and wristwatches, referred to dismissively as "wristlets", were considered a feminine accessory, little more than jewelry with a mechanism inside. As late as 1910, the New York Times called them a "silly ass fad."
Then the trenches changed everything.
In the chaos of the battlefield, pocket watches were dangerously impractical. Soldiers needed to coordinate attacks, time bombardments, and follow orders in conditions where reaching into a pocket could cost a moment no one had to spare. Individual soldiers began attaching wire lugs to their pocket watch cases, fixing them to leather straps, and wearing them on their wrists. Eventually, dedicated wristwatch cases were developed, many featuring radium-painted dials for visibility and wire grilles to protect the crystal from shrapnel.
Resilience, legibility, luminosity, and accuracy became vital design requirements, not aesthetic choices, but survival conditions. An officer's handbook from 1916 listed a "luminous wristwatch with unbreakable glass" among a soldier's essential kit.
When the war ended, veterans returned home still wearing their trench watches, setting a standard for civilian men to follow. By 1930, more wristwatches than pocket watches were being sold.
The wristwatch didn't begin as a fashion object or a status symbol. It began as a tool for survival. That origin is embedded in everything that came after, the pilot watches, the dive watches, the field watches, the obsession with legibility and precision under pressure. The DNA of the form is entirely utilitarian.
Which makes what's happening now all the more striking.
The Quiet Collapse of the "Tool Watch"
The entire premise of the wristwatch was utility.
Pilot watches, dive watches, field watches, these were instruments first. The ability to glance down and interpret time instantly was the point. Brands like Rolex and Omega built reputations on precision under pressure, not polish under a cuff.
But what happens when a growing segment of the population can't instinctively read the dial?
The "tool" aspect doesn't disappear, it simply stops mattering.
Not because the watches stopped working, but because the skill required to use them is no longer universal.
The Middle Market Problem
This is uncomfortable territory for brands that built themselves on the intersection of function and aspiration.
Patek Philippe or Audemars Piguet can absorb the shift without much friction, their customers were never buying primarily for legibility. But what about the brands that sold the idea of a serious instrument at a reachable price? Seiko, Longines, TAG Heuer, watches that earned their place on the wrist by being both beautiful and genuinely useful?
When utility becomes optional, the value proposition gets harder to articulate. Swiss-made precision means something different when the wearer never needs it. When a tachymeter goes unread. A GMT unused. An elapsed time never measured. The complications become decorative. The case back text, waterproof to 300 meters, tested under pressure, starts to read more like mythology than specification.
These brands will adapt. They always have. But the adjustment is not trivial. It means shifting from a language of performance to a language of identity, which is a different sale to a different customer.
Luxury Steps In Where Function Steps Back
Luxury has always thrived in the absence of necessity.
When something is no longer required, it becomes free to mean something else.
That's where brands like Patek Philippe, Cartier, and Audemars Piguet now operate with even greater clarity. They are not selling timekeeping devices. They are selling continuity, authorship, permanence, ideas that don't depend on whether the wearer can read the dial at a glance.
A watch becomes less about what it tells you and more about what it says about you.
This was already happening. Analog illiteracy simply accelerates the transition.
The Apple Watch Didn't Kill the Mechanical Watch
When the Apple Watch arrived, the expectation was straightforward, it would replace traditional watches the way smartphones replaced point-and-shoot cameras.
It didn't.
Instead, it clarified the divide.
Smartwatches are tools of interaction. They deliver information, track movement, extend the phone. Their value is in what they do.
Mechanical watches, by contrast, became more themselves. More deliberate. Less apologetic about their lack of utility. They exist in a different lane, one that doesn't compete on features.
If fewer people can read analog time, that separation only widens. The mechanical watch is no longer an alternative to digital timekeeping. It's something else entirely.
What the Numbers Actually Say
The industry's resilience is not anecdotal.
Swiss watch exports reached a record high in 2023, rising 7.6% year over year to roughly $31 billion, with mechanical watches generating nearly 80% of the growth in export value. That figure came after a sustained post-pandemic expansion, and it didn't arrive by accident, it reflected a market consolidating around exactly the kind of high-end, meaning-laden objects this shift favours.
2024 brought a modest correction. Exports declined 2.8% following three years of consecutive growth. The contraction was concentrated almost entirely in the entry-level and mid-range segments, with that segment dropping over 15% in export value. The higher price segment, meanwhile, held essentially flat.
The pattern is strikingly consistent. When the market softens, it softens at the bottom. The expensive watches, the ones no one buys to read the time, prove more durable. At the peak of the price pyramid, watches selling above $120,000 continued to grow at double-digit rates even through the broader downturn.
This is not what a category in decline looks like. It's what a category in refinement looks like, shedding volume, consolidating value, moving upmarket. The wristwatch is not disappearing. It is becoming more itself.
When a Skill Becomes a Signal
There was a moment when everyone could read cursive. When everyone understood how to use a film camera. When everyone knew how to read a map without GPS. When everyone could work a record player.
Those skills didn't disappear, they concentrated. And as they concentrated, something changed, the objects associated with them were elevated.
Cursive is the sharpest parallel. When it was quietly dropped from school curricula across the United States in the 2010s, it didn't vanish, it became deliberate. Handwritten letters became gestures. Fountain pens became objects of considered preference, sold in boutiques, discussed in collector forums, maintained with a care that ballpoint pens never required. The skill stopped being universal and became, for those who retained it, a small expression of how they chose to engage with the world.
Film photography followed the same arc, perhaps even more dramatically. When digital cameras made film redundant as a practical medium, film didn't disappear, it contracted into intention. Shooting on film today is a choice, not a default. And that choice carries weight. The gear, the process, the wait, all of it became meaningful precisely because it was no longer necessary.
Even vinyl records, long written off as obsolete, have followed the same trajectory, returning not as a necessity, but as a deliberate choice, with sales climbing steadily for nearly two decades.
The analog watch may follow the same trajectory. Not obsolescence, but concentration. The skill of reading it, and the deliberate choice to wear one, becoming a quiet signal of orientation.
Not of superiority, but of preference. Of how someone chooses to mark the hours.
The Long View
The irony is difficult to ignore.
At the exact moment when fewer people can read analog time, the finest watches ever made are still being produced. Movements are more precise. Finishing is more obsessive. Heritage is more carefully curated.
The industry isn't declining. It's refining.
In a way, analog illiteracy may be doing the luxury watch industry a quiet favor, relieving it of any remaining obligation to justify itself on functional grounds, and freeing it to exist entirely on its own terms. An object of patience, of craft, of accumulated time in another sense entirely.
And perhaps that's the future.
Not mass relevance. Not universal function. But enduring significance for those who choose to see time, not as numbers, but as something that moves, occupies space, and unfolds in a circle.
Because even if fewer people can read it, time hasn't changed.
Only the way we look at it has.
