➺ December 11, 2025

Hey {{ first_name | Neighbor }}. I don’t drink, but I do drink champagne. During holiday party season, that creates a problem: I can’t handle more than two glasses and always drink three or four. This results in highly inconsistent performances. High highs. Low lows.

I’m basically the John Cusack of eating pigs in a blanket. – AB

➺ Wrist Action: A special thanks to the folks at Bezel, who run the most compulsively browsable site on the internet, for sponsoring our big watch survey (full results below).

➺ Support What We Do: Like every other indie media outlet, we’re gonna have to hike prices in January. Get an annual subscription while the getting is good.

HOW TO BE CLOCKWISE
Make the right choices.

As the survey responses below suggest, people buy nice watches when something happens – a promotion, a milestone, a windfall. That's why, come holiday season, the sophisticates break out the JLCs and the bonused-out bankers break out the Rolexes. Watches don't just show off what you can afford; they show off what you've earned. A great timepiece may be the last socially acceptable way to say: "Guess what I did." And people do ask.

If this season is your moment, December is the best time to act. The pre-owned watch marketplace Bezel, which offers 25,000+ timepieces (all free of aftermarket mods, all authenticated in-house), has more than one thousand watches marked down by their sellers, some as much as 20%. In an industry that rarely discounts, that’s extraordinary – and it makes Bezel the most joyful, trustworthy way to get the watch you’ll want to wear out.

What we’re drinking about while talking.

➽ Feedback Looped
Why do we have to have EOY performance reviews?
Everyone wants to dismiss year-end performance reviews as corporate bullshit. But that's not what they feel like. These bureaucratic interventions have a more existential flavor and that is – despite what your boss may claim – entirely the point. Annual reviews are an outgrowth of the "Management by Objectives" movement that gained momentum in the middle of the last century. Arguably, that movement empowered the managerial class. But it also let businesses outsource discipline to individuals by demanding that they not only accomplish goals, but that they do so while making the business seem disciplined. Annual reviews are a product of this flipperoo. Though pitched as development-oritented, the process’s principal function is to turn self-control into institutional control by making you become, as Michel Foucault put it, “the principle of your own subjection.” (Anyway... I hope it goes well!)

➽ Choreographics
Why does Hollywood make putting on heels look so damn hard?
The #EllaMcCayChallenge began on Twitter (X) after Michael Roberts posted an image of himself attempting Emma Mackey’s pose – balanced on one foot, adjusting a shoe on the other – as seen on the poster for the new James L. Brooks comedy about a 34-year-old governor. The pose is both odd and oddly familiar. We’ve seen Anne Hathaway do it in The Devil Wears Prada, Sarah Jessica Parker do it in Sex and the City, and Sandra Bullock do it in Miss Congeniality. It’s a piece of physical shorthand used to characterize ambitious women struggling to maintain their dignity and humanity while multitasking. Is it a reasonably way to fix a high heel? Doesn’t matter. As the great American choreographer Merce Cunningham put it: “I don’t think there’s such a thing as abstract dance.”

➽ Merit, Based
Why isn’t anyone asking about our master’s degrees?
Earlier this week Fei-Fei Li – the Stanford Prof and "Godmother of AI" – went on The Tim Ferriss Show and described a new corporate meritocracy layered awkwardly on top of the old one like a Peloton on a Persian rug. “Degrees matter less than what you can build with AI,” said Li, who serves as CEO of World Labs, adding that she hires for speed and the willingness to collaborate with machines. On its face, that kind of productivity-focused hiring is meritocratic and logical. But it's also confounding to those who believe traditional qualifications – Stanford degrees, legacy internships, the “Gentleman’s Master’s” – are also the product of a meritocracy. It paradoxical. It isn't. Multiple definitions of merit can support multiple meritocracies. That’s always been true in theory and rarely been true in practice, which may explain why white-collar culture feels broken.

➽ Dress Coddled
Why do couples dress like that?
The “swag gap” – Gen Z’s term for couples who look like they’re dressed for different planets – is being misread (by the WSJ among others) as a way of discussing status imbalances in relationships. But homophily is at an all-time high; most Americans date and marry within their class and the prima facie examples of swag gappery – Justin Bieber in Crocs beside Hailey in a strapless dress, Benny Blanco in ripped jeans beside a glammed up Selena Gomez – are just power couples. What the discourse really reveals is that open and loving communication in relationships is still not enough to overcome the collapse of implicit dress codes. Lots of people who share a bed don't share a premise when it comes to getting dressed. This is precisely why preppy back. It's not just a style. It's rules we can agree on.

Want to earn up to $200-an-hour for your insights, get three free months of Upper Middle member-only content, and get a discount on annual membership. Join Upper Middle Research, our professional research platform.

WATCH ANN*

Asking a member of the information elite where they get their news is a bit like asking an alligator where they get fresh water. They're sunk in the stuff right to the eyeballs. It seeps in through their pores and push updates and text messages and parents, whose enthusiasm for misreporting only grows with age. Because innumerable sources of wanted and unwanted information collective constitute their environments, the sort of people who did the reading in high school spend the rest of their lives doing even more reading – becoming unintentional, exhausted panopticons submerged in an endless stream of interconnected content.

*the Ambient News Network ⬇

Upper Middle’s “Watch Watching Survey” (sponsored by Bezel) looked at the reasons members of the Oat Milk Elite buy luxury timepieces and the brands they use to send signals about themselves. Our data suggests that those signals are both context – and specifically professional context – dependent and broadly legible. To see someone’s watch is to get a sense of their ambitions, successes, and family economics.

To put it slightly punnily, watches help us present a face to the world – one that’s probably a bit less self-effacing than the one we usually use¹.

BUYING WATCHES

Most well-to-do Americans own at least one watch. Three-quarters (75%) reported owning at least one “nice watch” (broadly defined). Among those that do, most (70.59%) reported having purchased a watch for themselves and many (53.93%) reported received a watch as a gift – usually from partners (26.2%) or parents (12.83%). A meaningful minority (14.97%) reported having inherited a watch, a pathway correlated with both higher wealth and professional degrees (ρ ≈ +0.21).

Purchase motivations split along professional lines. Although 53% of respondents say they’d buy a watch simply because they “saw something they really liked,” actual behavior is more structured. Finance and consulting respondents overwhelmingly own self-purchased watches (70%) and are most likely to say they’d buy after a windfall (41%). Doctors and lawyers are far more likely to receive watches as gifts – often at graduation. Academic, nonprofit, and creative respondents are more likely (18%) to inherit watches and to cite taste as their sole purchase criterion.

Brand affiliation patterns reflect these differences. Business operations, strategy, and sales respondents have the highest Rolex ownership (35%), with strong showings for Omega (18%), Tag Heuer (16%), Seiko (16%). Finance respondents mirror these patterns but under-index on affordable brands like Timex and Casio. Tech workers skew toward Casio and G-Shock, while doctors under-index on Rolex and over-index on Tag Heuer (27%). Lawyers cluster in mid-luxury, favoring Omega and Seiko. All kinds of people wear Apple Watches², making them the least culturally or financially telling kind of timepiece for members of the professional class.

That said, all watch purchases are somewhat correlated to income. The likelihood of selecting “Personal Milestone” as a purchase motive rises sharply in the $150K–$199K band (~32%), remains elevated at $200K–$499K (~30%), and peaks among those with $1M–$2.5M in net worth (~38%). In other words, people begin buying symbolic watches not at the top of the income curve but when they feel they have crossed a threshold of legitimacy.

WEARING WATCHES

Respondents wear watches to send context-dependent messages. The consistency of responses to answers about which watches signal taste (Cartier, JWC, Vacheron Constantin) and which watches signal income (Rolex, Omega, Patek Philippe) drive home this point. Brands connote specific combinations of cultural and financial capital. 

Watches thought to imply success are more often deployed in professional settings, while watches associated with taste appear more often in social ones. Owners of Rolex (28% of Finance/Consulting/Business; 21% of Finance specifically) and Omega (20% of Medicine/Law; 16% of Finance/Consulting/Business) – report wearing their watches disproportionately in evaluative environments. By contrast, the few Academic/Public Service/Creative respondents who own luxury watches predominantly wear them to special events (67%) and, like owners of inherited watches, rarely wear them to work.

Geography and gender moderate signaling patterns. Respondents in coastal metros (NY, CA, MA, DC) boast markedly higher ownership rates of well-known luxury brands – especially Rolex and Cartier. Male respondents over-index on Rolexes and Omegas, which they are far more likely to wear in professional settings as, it would seem, legitimizing accessories or metallic comfort blankets.

WATCHING WATCHES

Interestingly, respondents’ watch preferences for themselves differ predictably from their watch preferences for others³. When selecting which watches they personally preferred, respondents leaned toward classic and refined watches. When selecting which watches made them think they’d like the wearer, they selected markedly more fun (think: Snoopy) and heritage timepieces.

Discrepancies in personal and social watch selection data imply that respondents choose watches for themselves that align with an aspirational identity – competent, established, upwardly mobile – while preferring other people wear watches that project either cultural fluency or approachability. The personal preference is distinction; the interpersonal preference is understatement.

CONCLUSION

Watches operate not simply as accessories but as markers of achievement and identity. Brand preferences map cleanly to profession and income because watches don’t just make a personal statement. They make professional, financial, and cultural statements as well.

And while watch consumption might seem like self-indulgence, there may be a practical edge to it. In 2011, Robert Nelissen demonstrated that visible luxury markers – watches included – reliably elicit greater deference and cooperation. In that light, the result of the Upper Middle survey suggest that those who buy watches to mark an achievement or milestone also use them to smoothing the path toward the next achievement or milestone.

Taken together, the patterns in this survey show watches functioning as compact expressions of ambition and class position – objects that let people display who they’ve become while hinting at the circles they hope to enter next.

WHO WATCHES THE WATCHMEN?

5) Other watchmen.
4) Watchwomen.
3) Hiring managers negotiating the watchmen’s salaries.
2) The watchmen’s greedy children.
1) Barracudas⁴.

[2] It could be – and has been – argued that these aren’t really watches so much as mini-phones you strap to your wrist. I’d argue that the data here supports that conclusion because owning an Apple Watch is basically just correlated to owning an Apple Watch.

[3] Let them wear Swatches.

[4] This joke has been brought to you by snorkeling.