The post for most parts was neat, not disagreeing there. But wrapping it up as some sort of empowering life lesson feels so utterly out of touch that I felt like reminding that it is huge privilege to be able to do this sort of thing. Someone not wearing custom luxury watch is most likely not due being afraid to make decisions for themselves. Attributing the ability to do this sort of thing to "connected world" and "people willing to help" is just distasteful to me.

It doesn't help that the whole post is titled "Designing my own watch" while the actual design work was seemingly mostly done by ochs; mixing up doing something and commissioning something done is another of those things that has echoes of ages past, and not in a good way.

For the authors defence I do say that 5 years ago was slightly different time and back then these sort of things could pass more easily.

Thanks Zokier for your comments, original author here:

The post for most parts was neat, not disagreeing there. But wrapping it up as some sort of empowering life lesson feels so utterly out of touch that I felt like reminding that it is huge privilege to be able to do this sort of thing.

Never was it my intention to provide one with "overarching life lessons". Your reaction points out that I still have a lot to learn in refining the tone of my English use. As non-native English language user, I use my blog to "hone my skills". You helped me learn, for which I am grateful.

For what it is worth, I use the knowledge and expertise that enable my "privileges" in my work as volunteer. You can find some posts on this here: https://willem.com/blog/2016-11-21_being-a-volunteer-in-amst... TLDR: I am very grateful.

Someone not wearing custom luxury watch is most likely not due being afraid to make decisions for themselves. Attributing the ability to do this sort of thing to "connected world" and "people willing to help" is just distasteful to me.

I do not entirely follow your reasoning here as I never have intended to "judge" or "rank" other people's choices and decisions. The post (on _my_ blog) is about _my_ watch, not much more than that.

It doesn't help that the whole post is titled "Designing my own watch" while the actual design work was seemingly mostly done by ochs; mixing up doing something and commissioning something done is another of those things that has echoes of ages past, and not in a good way.

Naturally I agree with you that a large part of the mechanical design is done by ochs und junior; however I do think that if you take the concept a little broader it might make a little more sense: given all the options out there, I set out to have a watch created that would fit my specific wishes. When I look at the result, I very deliberately know why I made certain choices in style, size, colour, material, function, capability and weight. In that sense I did take part in the design process.

For the authors defence I do say that 5 years ago was slightly different time and back then these sort of things could pass more easily.

Thank you sincerely, reactions like those of yourself enable me to learn. That is very much one of the reasons why I like the blog. Have a nice day!

Their comment was fine. An honest take. Yours manages to be worse, policing. It brought me here. Now look where we are.

This doesn't work. Use the vote button.

Fair.

It's just interesting to me that lower in the thread with less votes there are actually insightful comments that have real content and the most upvoted comment is the one that says "this sucks because I can't afford it".

This seems to me to be an issue in a number of other places as well - the website previously known as twitter is probably a good example where someone posts something and a lot of the replies are just random hate and nitpicking about a single, irrelevant word in the comment.

I guess I just don't get why people bother to do that. And it is kind of interesting to think about - is there some way to encourage more thoughtful responses?