The friend was impressed. The others at the table were too.

This is life with the next big thing in tech strapped to your wrist.

My piece of technological wonderment is small and black and helps tell time like a watch. That’s because it technically is a watch, in principle, but it’s not like any you’ve ever seen. And it’s a whole lot more than just that.

Meet the Pebble, a piece of wearable tech that is part of an ever-expanding yet-to-be-released line of products lumped into the 21st-century category of “smartwatch.” The term implies, of course, that all other watches that came before are technophobic Neanderthals, capable only of ticking away the seconds toward their eventual irrelevance.

Several months ago, I was incredulous and scornful of the idea that anyone could honestly attempt to argue that emailing was a time- and labor-intensive process. Now, after reading the above article, which teeters vertiginously on the ledge of self-parody, it seems obvious to me that I’ve actually been observing something strangely akin to the famous paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, in which ever-shrinking divisions of time are proportionately overhyped in a futile attempt to close the distance on a life containing meaning and significance.