I am, more than is usual, a hateful person. I don’t like most things others do. It takes me a while to warm to what mass culture considers important and exciting, and I am often beguiled at the ways people enjoy things like Taylor Swift ’s music and Netflix shows.
This isn’t because I think I am better or more interesting than the mainstream, but that life is short and I don’t want to spend it listening to a billionaire sing about their pet cats and such. But I am also fickle, and for a long time I struggled to understand how a stainless steel and vacuum-insulated jug from a 110-year-old outdoors firm became a status symbol. That is until I raised a Stanley cup and took my first sip from its FlowstateTM straw.
I had of course seen the TikTok videos. Those where hundreds of suburbanites camped outside strip-lit Targets in middle-America, desperate to get their hands on limited-edition bottles, arranging them into a rainbow wall of trophies at home, and demonstrating all the flavoured powders you can put inside them to trick the mind into doing something as natural as drinking water. (The alternative is – and bear with me on this – that you could drink from a traditional glass as and when your body sends thirst signals.
) The rush, speed and compulsion with which people would stockpile these aesthetically challenging flasks to me represented the worst aspects of online consumerism. An unquenchable thirst for more stuff and things. That you can now purchase an entire .