#150 - Taking Psychic Damage From Instagram Reels

Stanley water bottles/sippy cups hit the water bottle market in a way that made Yeti/Swell/Hydro Flask/Klean Kanteen/those stupid pouch things/Camelbacks suuuuper jealous.

(I'm purposefully excluding the actual queen, Nalgene, from this list as she is too ethereal to ever be jealous of any other brand that came after her. May she reign forever, etc.)

And while some may say Owala is replacing as the NEW! Trendiest Thing To Hydrate Out Of, Stanley's aren't going anywhere because there's simply too many Stanley-only accessories that have been purchased at this point. It would take hours and hours of people's lives to de-clutter their kitchen cabinets which have basically been remodeled in order to accommodate all of the Colorways™ and Exclusive Collabs™ that have been acquired.

Not to mention the bags to carry them, the bespoke straw toppers, name plates that seem to go on top of the lid, pouches that go around the outside, ice molds specifically in the shape of the cup so that it can keep drinks cold for a weirdly long time.

Like at some point I just have to wonder why it would take anyone that long to drink their Fancy Water drink. Why does it need to be cold overnight? Who is that for??

(Can you tell I was raised in an ice-adverse country that still to this day hasn't quite figured out how to serve chilled espresso based drinks?) (Don't even think of mentioning the phrase "iced coffee" in Ireland they truly will look at you with such sincere bafflement and widen their already massive blue/green googles at you.) (No one in Ireland has brown or hazel eyes, you heard it here first!)

What's new about the Stanley trend seems to be the accessories and adornments.

And if you haven't had a "Pack my Stanley with me to go to Target" reel/tik-tok/whatever other short form attention-sucking app we've developed, I am actually so jealous of you!

And about to give you the chance to ruin your incredible streak and irrevocably fuck up your algorithm by posting a /sincere example below:

Of course, this is all happening because Stanley launched affiliate marketing early in their run, which made a bunch of up-and-coming Lifestyle Aesthetic Micro-Vloggers glom onto the trend, leading to videos where they showed cabinets full of the latest "drops" which could also be described as: new colors.

And when people finally ran out of physical space to keep these giant water bottles, they pivoted to packing their Amazon Storefronts with Stanley accessories. And since there's no such thing as a "water bottle accessory" they also had to provide their audience with what they should buy to put IN their new "water bottle pouch". You know, like Rhode Summer Fridays lipbalms, and Wipe That Tushy! wipes, Touchland hand sanitizer (which they will have undoubtedly filmed being removed from it's brand new packaging and spritzed–uselessly–into the air before being gently shoved inside the too-small zip pocket), tiny packets of advil (how many headaches a day are we getting girlies lets check in with our doctors about chronic conditions!), Dior Lip Oil (so different from a lip balm), nail cuticle oil, mini deodorant, hair ties (multiple! sometimes both scrunchie and clip!), hand cream, and of course their YSL card carrier.

Since no trend exists without parody, you can now find more videos mocking these videos than the originals. But the mockeries all include the name-brand water bottle and accessories. So the "joke" of putting Zyn or cocaine into one of the little containers falls more than a bit flat for me. It's engagement bait. It's hollow because satire requires effort. And ultimately, they've still had to purchase the products.

It's the same feeling I get when I watch any of the videos and see they've filled their reusable water bottle with water from plastic bottles.

I know it's rage bait! I know they're just doing it so that the comments will be flooded with people pointing out this decision as stupid! But more importantly it is now also filled with people "defending" these creators for these choices. (Which I just have to state over and over again, the person filming the video made on purpose to generate this exact outcome!)

When we talk about unpaid labor, it doesn't apply to things like helping friends move. It applies to situations where strangers are spending time Red Team vs. Blue Teaming in comment sections because they have the urge to defense people "having preferences" and they'll call people "jealous" or invent stories whole cloth "have you considered that maybe she's using bottled water because maybe they're under a boil water advisory and–"

The plastic bottles still go to the landfill.

So, the ultimate loser?

The earth.

These "Aesthetic Videos" are mind-numbing and addictive. And it's not just water bottles, or entire rooms in homes being decorated via the same "Dark Academia" Pinterest board (sorry that trends probably outdated, is "eclectic grandpa aesthetic" still in? You know, the aesthetic of living a long and cool life that you've slowly acquired trinkets that remind you of various travels throughout?), it turns out you can bring the desire for everything to Look Perfect into menial objects. Like Ice.

Ice ASMR restocks are my nemesis.

(ASMR by the way seems to include any activity that makes somewhat repetitive noises now it has nothing to do with like tingles it got co-opted years ago.)

A snap, crackle, and poppy little video in which someone fills an entire drawer of their freezer with ice of various shapes, sizes, and liquid. Rose molds filled with actual rose petals, long stick ones made for plastic waterbottles, carefully placed cucumber and mint square cubes (click through to watch her place each leaf with tweezers in the previous video! just kidding, they never show the effort required to complete any of these ridiculous tasks), little ice balls, big ice balls, and of course cold brew ice balls (that were first half-filled and frozen with honey so they're split down the middle and have two shades of brown).

Squiggle glasses (which have replaced the ribbed glasses that were trendy last month–both available in the #linkinbio) thrust into frame across a marble countertop with rubber-topped glass straws get filled with pink ice in the shape of stars before a big CRACK announces the opening of the newest "healthy" soda (also pink) before it gets poured (messily) over the ice.

Stir-stir-stir straw against ice noises. Sip. End of video. (I lied, they probably placed the drink on their very pretty desk before the end, on a coaster that is also linked.)

What is it all for?

The resounding narrative has been that it's "aspirational".

But I find that incomplete analysis.

Aspirational to who? Of what?

Is the aspiration to have the kitchen this is all being prepared in? Is it the industrial sized freezer that few homes have the space or energy allowance for? The granite countertop island that's framed meticulously as to keep the creators head out of frame but their midriff centered just so?

(The way that bodies are centered on "faceless" accounts is a different conversation than the one I'm trying to have right now but it is jarring to watch any content about "That Girl" lifestyle or any productivity YouTuber for more than one video because inevitably they will reveal themselves to be deeply fucked up in how they think about "optimizing" their body. Looking directly at you, Ali Abdaal!)

It's not the kitchen, or the freezer, or the body.

It's the idea that by "romanticizing" something as banal as water temperature they can conspicuously demonstrate how wonderful and happy and together their life is to an outside audience.

I mean, when it comes down to it, the appeal is control.

Because control is always the appeal.

If I have that dream kitchen, it means I'm in control of my finances.

If I had that much ice to choose from, it would mean I'm in control of my calendar.

If I had magnificent accoutrements that made my life look and feel glamorous no matter how dull the task, it means I'm in control of my happiness.

The illusion comes apart for me when I see more than two of these types of videos in a row. Not just ice, but any "aesthetic restock". It usually has to do with the fridge and more acrylic bins than you've ever seen in one place outside of a Muji.

Hard cuts of water splashing over the sides of gold colanders, the soak/spin/rinse/dry of berry after berry, the glossy shots of carrots being dropped into a container that already has water in it so that they can capture the dramatic wave cresting over the side and onto the aforementioned perfect countertop.

They lose the appeal the moment I start to consider how much water is being wasted. And beyond environmental, who wants water on their counters??? Just put the carrots in the jar and then fill them up did we all miss the unit in seventh grade where we learned about water displacement and like...how matter works?!

It's just not behavior we see outside of our screens.

Real people don't spill water all over their counters because they then have to spend time wiping the bottom of each container. Also just – water isn't an infinite resource? Can we have a little respect for the modern miracle of clean and readily available drinking water?

I don't want to use the amorphous word "content" to describe these videos, because I think specificity matters. Micro-vlog isn't accurate either. It's a blip. A whisper of an idea of what a Good Life In America currently entails for 1% of the population. Because these aren't just Girlies Doing Girly Things, these are woman who run their own advertising businesses. Indie one-person businesses up against the grind of capitalism turning their home kitchen into sets!

(The amount of control these women have – and I am being specific because this is not content made by or marketed towards men – over their art and what they choose to make is so much greater in scope than most artists throughout history, yet there is no artistry to be found past the Tastemaker video that they're all clamoring to mimic. And those Tastemakers of yore (the millenials yearn for 2012) no longer exist, we are witnessing the dissemination of brand campaigns that had specific shots they wanted included in their ads, that becomes the New Aesthetic, and then we get months of a copy of a copy of a copy. Where's the ART!)

Affiliate marketing isn't new, but being able to do it with the entirety of Amazon's warehouse selection sure is!

They can tailor their "mindless" "relaxing" "zen" content in which they sell a lifestyle not even they themselves lead, to display whatever products suit best.

Reach in a drawer and pull out only neutral highlighters. Use a cute (linked) box cutter to open the (linked) fake flowers to place in the corner of your desk next to the (also-linked) puffy laptop case.

Maybe this is the natural conclusion of the internet, that it too would devolve into a place of barely-obfuscated advertisements, interspliced on occasion with ads that don't bother to hide what they are.

But this can't be the best we've got.

It's not meaningless or mindless. It's actively harmful.

Consumption is addictive. Particularly during times like these when pulling our head out of the sand takes tremendous effort. Like I'm aware that my vitriol for this trend is also misplaced desperate anger at the state of the world around me, but I also don't think this hyper-gloss presentation is helping anyone come to terms with the new reality we've come to exist in within the past decade.

And we're seeing all of it in the same place: on our phones. So everything gets flattened into "content" and given the same weight in our minds.

We see beautiful shots of desks with a claw clip just so and the next image is an earnest plea to support a GoFundMe followed by something oddly satisfying followed by a seemingly innocuous video of two kids being asked trivia questions but when you open the comments you just see horrific things being said about literal children and those comments are kept up by those kids parents for "engagement" and yet it's going to sound hyperbolic when I say I don't think kids are safe in homes with parents who treat them as content fodder.

And all of those things are given the same weight. Fleeting thoughts followed by horror.

I keep thinking about how new it is that so many of us are reading amateur words. Thoughts that have not been passed through an editor were not readily-accessible for mass consumption until this century. Sure, we had pamphlets and Zines and ways of communicating without going to J school, but almost everything published en masse was poured over by at least one other person. Letters to the editor were the best shot most people had. But in terms of pushing information to the masses, publishing was a barrier that scammers had to overcome.

The underselling of the damage done by our access and exposure to technology will define the rest of our existence.

It's addictive, it's where we get our news now (because it was easier to expose us to ads, and ads run the world more than anything else it's why our data is the most valuable information in the history of capitalism and why they're soooo bitter they have to offer "ask app not to track"), and modern society forbids untangling yourself from it. We apply to jobs, we order essentials that are no longer offered in store, we shop because if you're above a size 16 it's almost impossible to find clothes your size in stores (or outside of the men's side of thrift stores).

Two-factor authentication is keeping people houseless. That's not an exaggeration. It's why Eric Adams defunding libraries is an act of cruelty beyond robbing the public of a necessary good. Those are the only computers thousands of New Yorkers have access to.

Requiring everyone to have a cellphone is classism.

Performing life by living inside a home that acts as a set distances oneself from day-to-day life. YouTuber's who became Daily Vloggers always hit content walls where they end up going to Target almost every day because it's "something to do". When consumption becomes a source of joy, it becomes the easier answer to fill time.

We're not bored, we're shopping!

We're not moving our bodies, we're going on Hot Girl Walks where we are encouraged to "think hot thoughts" the entire time. But remember – it's not about your body. It's about hitting 20,000 steps a day and tracking your results publicly and putting "before and afters" up but emphasizing in the caption that it's not about how you look, but how you feel!

Everything has to get Turned Into A Thing because it needs to #becomeahashtag and it's fun and cute and benign and it's fine if people are having panic attacks waiting for emails to see if they got the Olivia Rodrigo Exclusive Stanley Cup because those girls deserve to be anxious all the time – they should have known better than to grow up in a world where status is defined by exclusive merchandise that can be gained via American Express points and "loyalty" to their favorite artist is defined by how many copies of the same album they own.

(And they can't dare criticize their favorite artist for selling nine "exclusive" versions because without those artificially inflated states, the artist won't be seen as infallible and if THAT were true it might be lame/bad/wrong to be a fan anymore, and instead of focusing on calming the vitriol we have for fandoms of artists, the fandoms will instead fight for accolades in order to create Hard Data to reflect how much Better their artist is than others, public perception be damned. The most streamed songs on Spotify aren't organic, they're being placed first after playlists and showing up the exact correct number of tracks apart on playlists that are being played through laptops with headphones plugged in (because streams don't count if you listen on mute) running on VPN's because there are six other laptops in the same room running the same playlists and this is encouraged behavior because it's seen as a "correction" for the "lack of attention" paid to the artist by the traditional gatekeepers. But now numbers mean nothing. So, that's fun, glad we ruined the ability we once (kind of) had (let's not forget payola) to track cultural relevancy of different albums.)

The internet is written in ink – as long as it stays around. We've gotten so sloppy about archives, and with the rise of deepfakes the internet is going to be rendered unusable soon.

Sorry, sorry, (that might just be my wishful thinking).

I look around and I see more deregulation when it comes to gambling, bald encouragement that maybe this purchase will fill the hole in our soul, and the trade-off that for all this technology there are enslaved children mining nickel in the Congo because people want to get the newest model of the iPad every year even though the tech hasn't meaningfully advanced since Steve Jobs died and it doesn't feel worth it because most companies that rely on the (perceived) genius of one mans design instincts will flounder to replace him but have enough of us locked into their super approachable "ecosystem" so now we have to humiliate ourselves and purchase a wire they've named "dongle" because their only new concept was to boldly (their words) remove the headphone jack so they could squeeze an extra few hundred dollars out of people for a product that may fall out of their ears and directly down a storm drain once a year, minimum. Oh an no we don't sell just one airpod. Oh and the phones keep getting bigger to the point they're literally too large for people (mostly women) to hold. Oh and they launched the newest version of these phones without the updated iOS software they were advertised with. I'm just saying, Steve Jobs would have hated all of those things.

(And I can say that over-confidently because I got lightly obsessed with the Aaron Sorkin Steve Jobs biopic this summer and then read his daughters book.)

And then I look around and realize how much time and money and effort I've spent cultivating my desk into a space I wanted to spend time because I do work from home and it is half of my kitchen and I, like Dorinda Medley, love to make it nice!

Beauty is an inherent thing humans value, and it makes sense to me that in a time of disconnection we yearn to romanticize our lives in order to substitute the genuine rush of having meaningful experiences!!!!!!

I bet millennials are more depressed because we don't have dining room tables! That makes sense to me! It makes sense that because millennials remain financially/housing insecure, they're not having kids. Having children, or even our friends having children, fundamentally changes ones relationship to themselves and the world. No wonder we have to go round-and-round about kid discourse, a wildly large number of 30somethings have never interacted with a child since they were one! First time in history this is true (thank you second-wave feminists for creating a reality in which women are not forced to Be Mothers as their only option!) and the impact IS staggering but we're seeing it happen through "discourse" which renders talking about it somewhat obsolete because it feels simultaneously infinite and finite.

It's not that we don't want to grow up – a lot of millennial frustration is due to the lack of growth opportunities and the arrested development isn't so cute and funny anymore.

There's been a startlingly quick return of eating disorder culture online, and I just want to take this chance to point out that keeping women hungry is a tool of their oppressors. (THEE Patriarchy at work!) Throughout history periods of liberation are followed by the thinnest trends. Suffrage was followed by the flapper era. WWII job boom was followed by the amphetamine wave that kept the first suburban housewives thin and 'happy'. The 70s saw no-fault divorce, our own bank accounts, a return to the workforce – and the 80s and 90s and 00s were dedicated entirely to body shaming any woman who dared not be a size 00 at all times.

I'm just saying, if you're hungry you're not thinking clearly. If you're hungry, you don't have energy. If you're hungry you're more likely to be cold and move slower. So, eating is an act of rebellion in a society obsessed with keeping women thin and diminutive. If you are consumed by "food noise" you're don't have as much time to dedicate to fighting your oppression. And it's consumed too much of time of too many women who had more to offer the world than their obedience to beauty standards.

We don't owe anyone an altered appearance. Having clear skin is actually not a moral barometer. If you're keeping your face still now in order to not have wrinkles later, when will you ever get to smile?

Beauty as perceived by a 2-D camera will always be different from how our eyes perceive beauty. If we are able to acknowledge that the magnificence of a sunset has never been completely captured, why would the same not be true for ourselves? What damage have we done by constantly turning the camera around? What will come of people who cannot bear to see their face without a filter laid over top?

Culture has skated by on "don't take it so seriously" for so long that we keep seeing explosions in weird areas where people are taking things way too seriously. Attacking music journalists won't change their opinion on an album, nor should it. Without Lana Del Ray's debut album, Born To Die having the infamous 6.6 on Pitchfork, we don't get to track the evolution of culture waking up to taking her contribution to music seriously. Which is way more fun than pretending that Pitchfork was infallible. Spin and Rolling Stone got it wrong sometimes that's why it's important to develop our own tastes that aren't reliant on others confirming whether it's Cool Or Not to like a thing we like.

But then again, I've never seen people so petrified of the idea of making a mistake.

There are plenty of people who are not wrapped up in the opinions of strangers. But they tend to be less Online so they don't counterweight the insurgence of insecurity masquerading as confidence.

The lack of meaning in modern culture is making people Make Meaning within forums that ultimately make them feel silly, so they get defensive and double down, which erodes critical thinking, which makes a lot of these spaces cult-y because no one is willing to voice dissent due to fear of ostracism.

So you listen to the album until you learn to like it, buy the limited edition version of your favorite to-go cup, and wear the merch you think is ugly/low-effort because community is now bought and sold.

The need for escapism is high, and therefore thoroughly monetized.

Resisting takes effort, and it's nice to give in and turn off. Constant vigilance? Sounds exhausting babe!

Maybe it does start small. Maybe taking instagram off our phones is the first step towards liberation. Maybe the impulse to display our lives will wane and we'll become protective of our hard earned privacy.

I don't want to be known by strangers. I don't want attention for attentions sake. I don't want to watch people "pack their Stanley's" as rage-bait. I am not a fish, bait is an insult to my intelligence and I insult myself every time I spend any emotional energy reading through the comment sections.

So, don't check my Amazon storefront. Resist the appeal of new!bamboo lids. Let's collectively get a grip and stop creating pantries that resemble grocery stores.

I think we deserve better. I think it's okay to admit that.

I want more for women than to become ad fodder.

I want more for women than their greatest excitement to be the cup they use.

I want more for women.

Our liberation is dependent on liberating ourselves but also creating non-judgemental community lead by deeply compassionate organizers. (And idk hopefully our government remembering that they have jobs/a duty to their citizens and they can idk finally take a whack at regulating the fucking internet for once???)

And in the meantime I get to be a right little griper about how aggravated I am by this lobotomized nonsense being forced into everyone's feeds because it's ad-friendly. I refuse to be baited into buying silicone ice molds!! I am not a fish, bait is an insult to my intelligence! The rise of 'trad-wives' doesn't fool me!! Just because the oppression creates familiar optics on camera does not make it a Good Idea!

Life shouldn't be flattened and happening remotely from inside a screen. News should not fall between outfits of the day's and links to the newest sunnies for 15% off (make sure to use their affiliate code!).

It has made everything feel hollow.

In making Every Moment Special we've somehow created standards for life that everyone now feels they're falling short of.

No one is satisfied.

Even when their drinks are still ice cold seven hours later.