When I got up this morning, I found that the watch I bought four years ago was running eight minutes slow.
Ah, so it’s finally time? Not one minute or two anymore, but an unignorable eight.
I’d changed the battery myself two years ago, so I still had some memory of how it went. I laid an eyeglass cloth under the watch face, pried the back cover off with a flathead screwdriver, and put in a battery I’d bought at Walmart. Then I set a hardcover book on top of the back cover and pressed down hard — click — the cover snapped neatly into place. It should be good to keep me company for another two years.
The whole thing took less than five minutes, and when it was over, a small but long-lasting satisfaction rose up from somewhere inside me: changing my own watch battery had actually become my default. That was something I never once imagined doing before. Life in Taiwan is so convenient that when a watch died, my reflex was to take it to a watch shop and have someone else swap it out. After moving somewhere less convenient, where labor is expensive, the inconvenience turned into an opening to develop my own potential: I started changing my own watch batteries, cutting my own hair, cutting other people’s hair, crocheting little cuties, making pudding… I’ve unlocked all sorts of unexpected skill points, and I’m grateful, too, to have been born in an age where YouTube makes it easy to learn things.
It turns out there’s a kind of freedom available to all of us, and it’s called “changing your own watch battery.” There’s another one called “could I just do this myself?”
Next time, in all those situations we take for granted, let’s stop and ask, “Could I just do this myself?” You might find that you can wind the time that’s fallen behind right back to good as new.
Note: I learned how to change the battery from this video. This guy is talented, and he even builds his own squirrel-proof bird feeders.
NB: This article was first published in Chinese on 09/08/26. It was later translated with assistance from AI tools, edited by me, and published in English on 09/09/26.