Against the obsession with water bottles

The water bottle is no longer just a water bottle. It is a status symbol. It is an extension of oneself. It is the source of good skin. It can hold half a gallon of water and keep it cool for eleven hours. It can be personalized, stylized and bastardized. It is Gen Z’s version of a purse dog, only heavier and less likely to destroy your handbag.

Everyone has a reusable water bottle: 79 percent of Gen Z carry one. Jordan Pickford used one as a cheat sheet in England’s game against Switzerland on Saturday, which is the most functional use of a water bottle I’ve seen in recent years. Only anti-environmentalists and people whose urine is the color of a sailor’s tooth are yet to buy one — at least that’s what TikTok keeps telling me.

I don’t actually have a problem with water bottles. How can I? They’re vessels that hold water and keep us hydrated. Taking issue with a water bottle is like taking issue with a plate. What I do struggle with is the fetishism surrounding them. Countless brands sell water bottles for toe-curling prices: Stanley, Yeti, Owala FreeSip, S’well, Chilly’s and Hydro Flask. The market for water bottles is a damning indictment of what Gen Z deems desirable.

“I like talking about water bottles. I can talk about them all day long. I like drinking a lot of water and I like talking about the vessels that actually hold the water in it.” No, these aren’t the last words you hear before being murdered in the Asda car-park by a Patrick Bateman-esque serial killer; these are the opening lines of a YouTube review called “My Favorite Water Bottle.”

There are thousands of videos like this. Influencers sit behind a desk and proceed to rub, caress, smooch and then suckle on bottles of plastic and stainless steel. And we, the general public, can’t get enough of it. By January this year, videos about Stanley cups had been viewed a soul-destroying 201.4 million times. Think about that. Videos of people sucking on what is essentially an adult training cup have been viewed more times than NASA’s YouTube upload of the Apollo 11 mission.

There are some water bottles that are undeniably useful: some have filters inside, others fold up. But what people seem to really want is the Stanley thermos flask, originally designed in the 1970s to hold a trucker’s coffee. Stanley increased its annual sales from $75 million to $750 million last year.

Of course, reusable water bottles are great for the environment, which is why they have caught on. But when these bottles become fashion items, leaving behind functionality, we have a problem.

Last year, everyone was buying those official Love Island Owala bottles, branded with the buyer’s name. I wonder how many have now been thrown out of a car window, killing a turtle in the process, because there’s a new bottle to buy, in Brat green. 

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.