Sometime in 2024, I fell in love with watches. The good, expensive kind. I was down a YouTube rabbit hole for something else and ended up in a watch-watching rabbit hole instead. Teddy Baldassarre. Kevin O'Leary. John Mayer's collection. I started making grand plans. But as with any decision in my life that involves spending a significant amount of money, I delayed the purchase as long as I could. Meanwhile I went deeper. My YouTube was only watch videos. My Insta explore page was only watch reels. I was in love. Then a friend I never thought would be into watches started posting about them. Then a couple of influencers who had never once mentioned watches, whose audiences couldn't care less about watches, started posting too. It didn't look paid. It looked like genuine love, which was the weird part. Then I saw the pattern. Everyone around me who had suddenly discovered watches had the same profile as me: same age, same circle, same assumed income, same life stage. We hadn't found a passion. We were a TG with wrists. Instantly, I fell out of love. I retraced my steps. I had been reading a lot about equities, finance, numbers. Enough for the algorithm to figure out I could be sold watches as an asset class disguised as good taste. And I'm fairly sure everyone around me got the same treatment. Here's how it works. First the recommendation engine gets you. Then performance marketing takes over. Then the feeds of your entire circle hit resonance, and FOMO finishes the job. True for recent watch lovers. True for recent coffee machine buyers. True for any trend where people who look like you all buy the same thing in the same year. Who benefits? The platforms. Nobody at Instagram sat in a room and decided I should like watches. The machine just optimises for watch time, and it's very convenient that the things that hold a man in his 30s' attention cost as much as a hatchback. More watch time, more brands who need to reach that interest, more ad money. The platform gets paid whether you buy the watch or not. The other winners are the early movers, the people who genuinely loved the craft before the rest of us got enrolled. In investing terms, they get to dump their interest on retail. They become the influencers, launch the product lines, land the brand deals. Teddy Baldassarre has a watch store now. And the asset class part? Most watches lose value the minute you wear them out of the store. Even the hyped ones had been sliding on the resale market since 2022. So in 2024, I wasn't getting in early. I was being recruited after the top. I was the retail. So these days I look out for the next planted interest and find the people who were there before the algorithm arrived, because capital will flow through them. Partner early and you can capitalise a little. Yes, I know. My response to discovering the scam is to ask for equity in it. Or at least profit from it. How do you protect yourself from being planted? Every time I feel a new want, I ask how I felt about it at 13 or 14. Did it make me go, "one day I'm going to get that"? For me that's cars. Something beautiful would pass me on the road and it would actually take my breath away. And sneakers. Just walking into a shoe store made me happy. Was 13-year-old me also brainwashed? Obviously. By car magazines and Nike ads. But a want that has survived all these years with nobody retargeting me has earned its place. So now I run every want past my 13-year-old self. Because my adult self is heavily compromised.