MLately I’ve been lying awake into the wee hours of the morning, mesmerized by videos on how to repair watches – pinions, gear train bridges, pallet forks, barrel shafts, the whole shebang. Am I interested in watches? No. My interest in watchmaking could only wane if I fell into a coma. My wristwatch hasn’t worked for months and I may never want to know what time it is again – standardized timekeeping just puts expectations on me that I don’t feel I can currently meet. I just want to stay calm and peaceful while people with tiny screwdrivers talk about amplitudes and repair components smaller than the light in a robin’s eye. That’s what the 21st century has made of me. I’m not a watch person. I already had my own interests: I’m destined to lie awake reading novels, following current events, and devouring Korean vampire-medical-action rom-coms. (My goodness, Korean vampires are attractive.) Watches? In a reasonable world, I wouldn’t care if you told me your crown gasket was rotting or your balance staff was crooked. In a reasonable world, I wouldn’t know which Patek Philippe you’re talking about.

But this is the world where the internet doesn’t connect us in knowledge and strength – it drowns us in the monetized nightmares of a) a child’s drawing of a cursed candle b) a fascist South African leprechaun. Wealth addicts exploit us for fear clicks and radicalize us as foot soldiers in race war. Exquisite computer programming, based on world-class research, saving humanity work and suffering? No. We get shit AI. We didn’t want it more than Clippy, but here it is, collecting data from everywhere at once, turning the rich tapestry of human achievement into a mush of plagiarism, racial prejudice and porn, then serving it up in disturbing beige nuggets. And when I need to write an email, I don’t want AI to “help” me sound like a cursed mannequin pretending to be an intern, I want to sound like myself. In a sane world, the power to save our planet or burn it into radioactive misery and blood dust would not be in the hands of a Russian gangster with Botox and a tracksuit fetish, or a Winnie-the-Pooh lookalike who advocates mass incarceration and perhaps organ harvesting. At the very least, the malignant narcissistic Hannibal Lecter fan who can’t remember which women he’s sexually harassed is unlikely to go anywhere near the nuclear football again. But why was that even an option?

The great Trump collapse is the culmination of so many bad decisions. America’s still-fascinated media is watching Donnie fall apart like shit in a hot tub, never admitting they helped create him, just as our media amplified Nigel Farage’s “don’t blame me for the riots.” Nige is still on the Trump bandwagon, not the Clacton one. Liz Truss is also courting Trump’s base. Thank goodness. There’s a lot of frankly disturbing wishful thinking about populism, and wishes can lead anyone astray, even when the MAGA door to fame and fortune is falling off its hinges. Lizzie and Nigel expressed legitimate concerns about immigration – not to mention racism – and rose. As influencers distanced themselves from rioters who burned down a library to prove the superiority of Western culture, Truss’s impeccable sense of timing kicked in and she began to reinforce free speech as the right to say horrific and radicalising things without consequences. Does she want to become another Rosa Parks – but to people who might loot Greggs? Failing that, would photo opportunities with Jimmy Choos and a burning rubbish bin suffice? An appearance is an appearance.

When you persistently put wealth over reason, profit over compassion, and balance facts with insanity, you get Trump, Trussonomics, Musk, and more reclusive, sinister disruptors like Peter Thiel and Mike Flynn. Disruptors make money by treating reality like a snow globe—shaking, shaking, shaking—until people shatter. But even obscene wealth cannot overwhelm reality. Ultimately, reality always overcomes illusion, but the damage done by disruption remains. If you run enough contradictory thought experiments, suppress all oversight, suppress education, publish enough psycho-constructed horror stories, overheat every opinion, you will get to the point where everything has to be renegotiated – whether women should speak, whether all people are people, whether starvation is a bad thing, whether death is an inevitable byproduct of economics and diplomacy, whether dying of preventable disease is a big deal, whether dying of cold in your own home is a big deal… In summary, the right’s thought experiments are always about death – yours and mine. Prison camps, slavery, torture, Nazism, civil war, witch burning, ritual murder – there is no dirty idea that the public discourses and information rulers of the 21st century have not seized upon or swallowed. And why do so many would-be populist demagogues sound like Pennywise having oral sex with a navigation system? Do you think we find this convincing?

I prefer the watchmakers, the quiet, ordinary voices that describe centuries of determined improvement in form and function, a pursuit of reliability, precision and utility. Centuries of improvement are what make the world sane. Let me see capable people treat broken but deeply useful mechanisms with patient understanding, sensitivity and respect—let me see that expertise, tenderness and modesty matter. And when I’m sick of people preying on beauty and stealing joy, let me see a watch case that opens and shows me unexpected beauties that lie inside like a happy secret, for the sake of functionality, the joy of creativity and the dignity of a craftsman offering his best to strangers. There are ways of being in the world that welcome the stranger. Sometimes we are all the strangers. And sometimes we are the people with skills who know how to make and repair, how to be friends, how to be neighbors. When the world shakes, we need neighbors—all of our neighbors. I like the feeling I get when a wheel starts turning again after lost years, breakups, deaths and abandonment. I am convinced that determined people who know how important love is in practice are always able to restore at least part of the things that have been broken.

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