Connecting: Automatic vs Hand-Wound

With several in rotation, I’ve developed deeper “connections” (or “bonds”, whatever that might mean!) to my automatics than my hand-wounds

Because there’s a need to physically move the automatics to keep them wound, they seem to be always the first worn in the morning, and stay worn longer during the day. Versus a hand-wound, where so long as I remember to give it its daily winding, it can be put down for later.

The stuff we wear the most invariably becomes the things we feel most inseparable from, which I know is stating the obvious.

But has anyone else seen, for example, that their daily wear of a hand-wound is a lot less than an automatic, just because the hand-wound doesn’t “need you” as much as the automatic? Do you find you’re generally less “connected” or bonded to your hand-wounds?

I don't think about it, like at all. If I change a watch, I wind it. I almost always wear my watches to bed, so if it's a manual, I wind it after my shower when I put it back on.

My wrist watch choice is based on my mood or need for the day (dress vs beater), I don’t have enough watches to choose one similar manual over an automatic. I imagine I’d prefer the automatic because of the constant interaction of my movement winding it. I do enjoy connecting with my pocket watches through manually winding them though.

I switch watches so much, automatic or manual is irrelevant. I have to wind and set both to wear them.

I have a couple of quartz watches I wear occasionally and it always surprises me when I pick one up.... Oh hey, it's already running. 🤪

I have always found automatics to be more interesting, advanced, desirable ( just my personal perception of course) and have a large number of them, with manual winds being a very much smaller percentage maybe 10% or so ( I dont know how they crept into my collection originally) but now having both to choose from I find that it matters not at all what I grab out of the watch boxes to wear in fact I have started to enjoy the action of winding a manual watch so much so that now I am almost as likely to purchase a manual as an automatic.