All the Options You Didn't Ask For

You tap the screen. The vibration against your wrist is so small you almost miss it. Almost.

It’s Tuesday, 7:14 pm, and you’re sitting in the parking lot outside Target with the engine still running, and you are scrolling through another comparison page for something you bought eleven months ago. The thing on your wrist — the thing you were so sure about, the thing that was supposed to fit — feels heavier than it did in March. Not physically. The band is the same. The face is the same. But your wrist knows.

Your wrist knows.

This is what they don’t tell you about having options: choice is a kind of tax. Not the kind you pay in dollars — although, sure, that too. The kind you pay in the back of your head, the small hush of what if I’d picked the other one. The one with the slightly different screen. The one your friend wore when you met for coffee last month and looked, briefly, like someone whose life was more put together than yours.

The vibration again. A notification. You tilt the screen toward you and the light catches your face in the rearview mirror, and you look — for a split second, in the dim of a Target parking lot — like a person who is being watched by a small device and is not sure how she feels about it.

I know this is silly. It’s a watch. It’s a small watch. People wear them now like people wear glasses: as if they have always been there. But you remember the day you put it on. You remember how it felt to slide it over your hand, how the cool of the backplate kissed the inside of your wrist, how you thought — for one bright, ridiculous second — this is the one that will keep me on time, the one that will track my runs, the one that will let me leave my phone in my bag. You remember thinking you were done thinking.

You were not done thinking.

You think about it now more than you want to admit. You think about it on Sunday mornings when you make coffee and the screen lights up with steps you didn’t take, with a heart rate that is, frankly, none of its business. You think about it in the elevator at work when someone’s wrist catches the fluorescent light just so and you find yourself — against your will, against your better judgment — looking. At the shape of it. At the way it sits. At the question of whether that one would have been better.

Here is the thing you don’t say out loud, even to yourself, especially to yourself:

You didn’t buy a watch. You bought the feeling of having decided.

And the feeling is wearing off.

Why is this so hard. You stand in the kitchen at 6:47 in the morning — the kids are not up yet, the dog is looking at you like you’ve already let him down — and you turn the thing over in your hand. The sensor on the back is a small dark eye. It has been watching you sleep. It knows your resting heart rate. It knows, probably, that you fell asleep at 11:23 pm and woke at 3:14 and lay there for nineteen minutes doing the thing you do at 3:14 am, which is to lie there.

It knows that. And what does it do with it? It tells you, in the morning, that you slept “fair.” Fair. The word makes your stomach drop a little, just slightly, just enough that you notice. Fair. Not good. Not restorative. Fair. As if you are a thing being graded by a thing on your wrist that cost you — you don’t want to think about what it cost you, because if you think about what it was for, you don’t have an answer that satisfies you.

You bought it because the person next to you had one. You bought it because the ad was good. You bought it because the woman in the soft-lit photograph looked, briefly, like the version of yourself you were trying to become. You bought it because you are a person who buys things, and the things you buy are sometimes the closest you get to the version of yourself you are trying to be.

The breath in your chest gets a little shallower when you admit this. Just a little. You keep your eyes on the coffee.

Here’s a question you didn’t ask for, but here it is:

When did choosing become this much work?

You remember — or maybe you don’t remember, maybe this is a story you’ve invented — a time when the only watch was a watch. There was one. You wore it. It told time. It did not know your heart rate. It did not ask about your sleep. It did not, every few hours, vibrate against your wrist to remind you that you have not stood up in forty-five minutes, as if you are a creature that requires nudging.

That watch did not promise to know you. That watch was content to be a watch.

The new one promises to know you. The new one offers you a face — a literal face, the digital kind — that you can change every morning if you want. You can have one with the moon on it. You can have one with the tide chart. You can have one that shows you, in a small elegant font, what the air quality is like outside, as if you were going to do anything about it, as if knowing the air quality changes the air.

You change the face once, in March, and never again. The new face is fine. The old face would have been fine. The face is not the point, and you know the face is not the point, and yet you paid — you don’t want to think about what you paid — for a thing whose main feature is the option of a different face, which you will not use.

Your palms get a little damp when you admit that too.

There is a thing that happens when you have many options. The thing is not joy. The thing is not even indecision, exactly. The thing is a low, humming guilt — a feeling that you are wasting something, that somewhere there is the right one, the perfect one, the one that would have fit just so, and that you, in your haste, in your ordinary Tuesday evening, did not find it.

This is the lie of choice: it tells you there is a you-shaped watch. There is a watch that was made for your wrist, for your habits, for your specific version of a Wednesday afternoon. And you are failing to find it. You, with your average wrist, with your average pulse, with your ten thousand steps you take in the ordinary way that ordinary people take them — you are not finding the watch that was made for you.

And the watch you have — the one on your wrist right now, the one buzzing gently as someone likes a photo of you from 2019 — is not bad. It is fine. It tells the time. It sometimes tracks a run. It does, occasionally, vibrate to remind you to breathe, which is a sentence you would have found absurd two years ago and now find, on some days, a little true.

But it is not the one. It is not the one you would have picked if you had picked again. And the thing about choice is this: once you know you can pick again, you can never really stop picking. The picking is now a thing you do, in the back of your head, every time you look at your wrist.

Here is another question, and you don’t have to answer it:

What are you really shopping for?

Because it’s not the watch. The watch is a watch. A watch is, finally, a small round thing that tells you what time it is, and the time will be what the time is regardless of which small round thing is on your wrist. The watch does not change the time. The watch does not, despite its many promises, change the kind of time you are having.

What you are shopping for is the version of yourself who has decided. The version of yourself who, in a parking lot on a Tuesday evening, is not scrolling through nine tabs trying to figure out if the other one had a longer battery. The version of yourself who put it on in the morning and did not think about it again until the evening, when she took it off to sleep, and then put it back on in the morning, and that was the whole story. No tabs. No comparison. No quiet hum of what if.

That version of yourself exists, somewhere, in some parallel life. She does not lie awake at 3:14 am. She does not, on Sunday mornings, weigh the watch in her hand like she is weighing a small life decision. She just wears it. The way you wear a wedding ring you no longer think about. The way you wear glasses you got in 2014 and have not, in the twelve years since, considered replacing.

You want to be her. That’s the whole truth of it. You want to be the person for whom this is settled.

And your chest gets tight, just slightly, when you realize you are not her yet. You might never be her. The settling might be a thing that happens to other people, in other lives, who chose differently at some earlier fork you didn’t see.

So you take it off.

Not forever. You take it off for the evening. You put it on the nightstand next to the book you’re not reading and the phone you should put down. You look at it for a moment. The face is dark. The sensor on the back is a small dark eye, and it is, for now, not watching.

You put your hand flat on the nightstand next to it, palm down, and you notice — for the first time in eleven months — how light your wrist feels.

How strange. How strange that the absence of a small thing could feel like a presence. How strange that you have been carrying, this whole time, not the watch but the decision about the watch, and the decision was the heaviest part. The watch itself was, in the end, just a watch.

You sit there for a moment. The dog, in the kitchen, has given up on you. The house is quiet in the way houses are quiet on a Tuesday at 8 pm when nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and the only thing that has changed is that you have, finally, taken the thing off your wrist.

You don’t put it back on before bed.

You don’t put it on in the morning.

You wear it again on Thursday — because of course you do, because there is a meeting, because you want to track your steps, because the watch is still a watch, and the world has not yet invented a way to tell time without one — but on Thursday the watch is, slightly, less heavy. On Thursday the watch is a watch. On Thursday, when the screen lights up and asks you how you slept, you don’t answer. You just look at it. You just look at it for a moment before you put your coffee down and start your day.

It is, in the end, a small round thing.

You are, in the end, a person.

The person is bigger than the watch.

You knew this, somewhere, before Tuesday in the parking lot. You knew this the day you bought it. You knew this the morning you put it on. You knew this — I think you knew this — the whole time. The watch was not the thing you were looking for. The watch was the shape of the looking.

And the looking, finally, is allowed to stop.