Mark Wahlberg rises at 2.30am to seize the day. He doesn’t know what he’s missing

A few years back, I met a hot-shot entrepreneur intent on squeezing the living bejesus out of his every waking hour. Every day, he’d run for 60 minutes to and from work for his exercise fix, while listening to highbrow audiobooks on philosophy, religion, economics and psychotherapy. Yet this multi-tasking still wasn’t enough for him. In an effort to turbocharge his self-growth with maximum efficiency, he listened to the audiobooks at double-speed. Apparently, you get used to the chipmunk voices after a while.

For the new breed of go-getters, you see, it’s far too pedestrian to merely seize the day. You have to crush it into tiny pieces, then use them in some complex biohacking procedure to become fitter, smarter, healthier – a billionaire sex machine who’ll still be running marathons well into their 90s.

The quest for self-improvement has clearly entered a new realm of hysteria when Mark Wahlberg boasts about getting up at 2.30am to make time for his cryotherapy and multiple workouts. This type of souped-up playbook for the morbidly aspirational takes the capitalist drive for peak productivity and applies it to the self. It all sounds thoroughly exhausting – or is that just me?

My personal antidote to this frenzied cult of self-optimisation is to wear a manually wound watch. Every morning, when I really should be speed-learning Mandarin or working on some half-baked side hustle, I instead slowly turn the crown of my watch by hand.

A manually wound movement gives me a slimmer watch case, but I also like the daily ritual of tactile engagement with my watch. With every twist between finger and thumb, I feel the faint resistance of the crown building energy in the mechanical movement, which is then steadily released, second by second, throughout the day.

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I think of it as a wrist-bound version of the slow movement – but there’s something else going on, too. Winding your watch is a daily reminder that energy is a finite resource. It needs to be monitored and regularly topped up, otherwise your watch will conk out. You don’t need to take any smart drugs to realise there’s a message here, too, about the sustainability of the rise-and-grind lifestyle: that which you wind up also needs to wind down.

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