If the future is here — artificial intelligence (AI), social media, electric cars, digital revolution — what else is in store for our children’s future?

The answer, based on experts’ observations, has been here, too — long before today’s generations Alpha and Beta have been born. According to these experts, thanks in part to over digital saturation and partly due to curiosity, today’s younger generations are going back to the technologies of their forefathers.

Time to rewind

From targeting 10,000 steps per day to tracking one’s phone, smartwatches offer many functionalities that no ordinary mechanical clock can provide, making these rechargeable arm pieces all the rage nowadays.

But for 145-year-old Japanese watch brand Seiko, the emerging collectors of its traditional watches are not veteran gentlemen’s club members, but Gen-Zs.

“I’m sure, a lot of people wear smartwatches for its health functions, etc. But wearing a traditional watch still gives a different feeling… traditional time keeping is still special and dear,” Darlene Perez, brand manager for Seiko Philippines, told DAILY TRIBUNE in an exclusive interview, implying that since analog nostalgic pieces are rare, they have become more special than the more common high-tech ones.

According to her, Seiko Japan granted the Philippines six country-exclusive collections limited to 1,000 pieces per variant because every collection gets sold-out in a week among watch groups or fan clubs. She noted that these clubs include young members with a “growing hobby” of buying the brand’s entry-level watches as “a piece of their heritage” and “fit for their active lifestyle” because of features not present among digital timepieces like automatic winding, water resistance and Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) or extra hand for different time zones.

As Perez observed, “In the watch community, there’s no old or young. It’s all about love for watches.”

Sound trip playback

In this day and age of iTunes and Spotify, vinyl records have still found their way to the youth, particularly Gen-Zs, who are now into collecting vinyl records more than the previous generations, a representative for vinyl records store Satchmi told DAILY TRIBUNE.

Thus, from stand-alone stores, Satchmi has extended to kiosks and booths and had been joining bazaars such as the recent Kultura Fest in SM Mall of Asia, Pasay City, to reach more of its vinyl records’ market — the Gen-Zs, who apparently find it thrilling to scour for rare vinyl record finds just like “treasure-hunting” in an ukay-ukay (thrift shop). Listening to records over coffee or beer has also become community gatherings among this age group.