13 January

I needed a new drink bottle for work. We had one of these at home and I thought perfect, one simple moving part, easy to clean, potentially usable for the rest of my life. What happened next is another window into an adult life that is now Year 9 on infinite repeat. Not an analogy, you can’t unsee it, once you see it. ‘You can’t use that!’, I got from multiple people. ’Why’? ‘It’s a restaurant water bottle!’ ‘Um, yes they do use them in restaurants. It’s just a water bottle.’ Much laughter and incredulity. You can see here up close how much adult life is Year 9 negotiating everything through social conformity, various totems like what cars people drive, whether they wear a mask, what drink bottles they use, what coffee they drink, what shoes they wear, etc. etc. etc. Exhausting and without end. You won’t find any part of adult life that hasn’t been pulverised into branded, trending parts, to allow social groups to fight for status. The only organising principle of these kidult lives is ‘do I fit in? How is my status in the group? Why is that person different (snigger snigger, whisper), we don’t like them…’. Adult life is the school playground. The hilarious irony is that water bottles have become an industry. Full of brands and designs, to generate imitative rivalry between a proliferation of social groups. Most of which end up in landfill within a year, as people upgrade to the latest trending bottles. It’s outrageous and funny apparently to use a simple glass bottle to drink water from, but not to jump on the brand-train of bottles. Kidults.