Why are analog watches more popular than digital watches? Why do analog watches survive?

Analog clocks are superior to digital clocks because they intuitively demonstrate the relativity of time. There are times when you need the accuracy of a digital watch, but for everyday use, analog watches are more useful.

 

Why are analog watches more popular than digital watches? I think it’s a no-brainer. Rather, I think the question we should be asking in this day and age is, “How did digital watches manage to infiltrate the analog world? But people don’t think that way. They think that the question we should be asking is, of course, why is analog surviving? I would like to question this.
First, let’s talk about why analog watches are more popular than digital watches. I believe it’s because analog watches function better as watches. People think that the function of a watch is simply to show us the number 00:00. But if you think about it, you realize that’s not the case. The function of a watch is to allow us to have an “awareness of time”. Time is the division of the day into regular intervals so that when we do something, we know when to start it, when to finish it, and how long to do it for. Let’s apply this to our daily lives.
First, the clock tells us what time of day it is at this moment. This is something we’ve learned over time, and it’s something we remember sensually. For example, ‘I wake up at 6:30am, shower at 7:00am, go to work at 7:30am, eat at 12:30pm, and leave work at 6:00pm,’ and we associate the clock with our entire day. Secondly, the clock tells us the interval, how much time has passed from one point to another. Third, it shows how much time is left until what time.
Let’s give some examples of these. First, let’s say it’s 4:27 on a digital clock. After a while, you look at the time again and it’s 5:13. How much time has passed? Do you have a gut feeling? When you look at an analog clock, you can just look at it and know roughly how much time has passed. But when you’re told it’s 4:27 or 5:13, you have to calculate it. So when you calculate this time, do you subtract 27 from 60 and add 13 to it, or do you think of an analog clock? In fact, if you just think of a picture at about 4:30 and a picture at about 5:15, you can easily see that you have about 45 minutes left. Even if we didn’t think in terms of pictures, but in terms of numbers, 30 minutes and 15 minutes, we would still end up saying the same thing because the values we arrived at by rounding up came from an analog clock. Here’s another example. You have an urgent task to finish by 6:00. The time on your digital watch is 5:37. Do you immediately realize how much time you have left? 60 minus 37 equals 23 minutes. You don’t have to do this, you can look at the analog clock and see that the pressure is building. Feeling a sense of urgency means that you have a good sense of where you are in relation to the time, which is 6:00.
To summarize, to be aware of time is not just to know the number, but to know its relativity to other times of the day, or to the whole of time, to today. That’s why we don’t get a good sense of it from a digital clock, that is, from four numbers next to each other. Furthermore, when we do numerical calculations, we count in tens. 1, 10, 100, and so on. But a watch is 60 units. You have to do a slightly different math than you’re used to. But if you look at an analog clock, the hour hand, minute hand, and second hand go around the clock in one cycle. And when you look at the watch, you can visually tell at a glance where the hour and minute hands are in that cycle. The relativity of time is clearly visible.
Despite this clear difference between the functions of analog and digital watches, and despite the fact that we feel it directly, we feel that digital watches are better. Of course, there are certain functions that digital watches specialize in. Digital watches are convenient and important when it comes to knowing the exact time. But does our life always require precise time? Not really. In fact, for most of our lives, we only need to know the approximate time. And yet, digital watches seem to do a better job of it and are taken for granted because we’ve become addicted to a society that is constantly chasing technological advancements, so if something has the word digital in it and has a bunch of numbers on it, it seems more cutting-edge and therefore better. We forget what it’s supposed to do and what it’s supposed to be worth.