THE ‘ODDLY SATISFYING’ VIDEOS
It is everything the rest of the Internet isn’t — soothing, slow-paced, non-interactive, noncommercial and does not involve meditating, writes
IWAS pregnant, anxious and looking for an online diversion to help me sleep (repeatedly searching the Internet for “rare chromosomal disorders” wasn’t cutting it). Then, one dawn, I stumbled through a YouTube portal and into the universe of Oddly Satisfying videos.
These videos are compilations of physical objects being manipulated in certain highly specific ways: melted, smoothed, extruded, carved, sliced, dissolved. Frosting piped fluidly over a layer cake. Molten glass slowly ballooning from the tip of a blowpipe. Crayon wax swirling in a factory vat, propelled by the rhythmic swoosh of a giant paddle.
“Ooooooh,” I whispered to myself. “This is it.”
YouTube and Instagram are home to thousands upon thousands of these videos. Their titles are expository and sometimes grammatically spotty: Oddly satisfying video that will put you in absolute calmness, 1,000,000 Dominos falling is Oddly Satisfying, and Satisfying Floam Crushing Compilation No. 6.
Some of the videos are compilations of reused clips — baking tutorials, pottery demos, factory tours. But many are purposebuilt. Knives slice bricks of coloured clay into immaculate rectangles against a white infinity backdrop. Disembodied hands knead stress balls or stir paint in hypnotic circles.
The videos seemed to scratch an itch I didn’t know I had. If I watched long enough, I felt lightly hypnotised, as if one of those disembodied hands had reached in and massaged my brain.
It was 2016 when I discovered Oddly Satisfying, and I needed a little brain massage. The terrors of imminent parenthood aside, the whole world seemed to be cracking up. In late October, my son was born. Two weeks later, Donald Trump was elected president. Awake at 2am, jiggling the baby, I’d tap open my phone, glance at the headlines and immediately hide it under my pillow. Oddly Satisfying was one of the few corners of the Internet that didn’t make me want to cry and never stop.
That year was, perhaps not coincidentally, when Oddly Satisfying exploded in popularity. Like many niche preoccupations, it emerged from Reddit; a subreddit dedicated to posting Oddly Satisfying videos and GIFs (graphics interchange format) was born in May 2013 and now has 2.6 million members. A Google search for “oddly satisfying” brings up about 4.7 million results.
Kevin Allocca, head of culture and trends at YouTube and author of Videocracy, a book about the cultural impact of viral videos, says the phenomenon of Oddly Satisfying has always existed — we just didn’t have a name for it.
But just what makes Oddly Satisfying so oddly satisfying? While the videos have yet to become the subject of major scientific inquiry, there are some theories. It may have to do with symmetry, patterns and repetition, which our brains seem to find inherently pleasing. It may have to do with a sense of “flow” — the state of being completely absorbed in an experience. Or it may be related to the “autonomous sensory meridian response”, the phenomenon of deriving a pleasurably tingly sensation from certain auditory stimuli, like tapping or whispering or crinkling, which is itself a bit of a mystery.
“There may be something in the physical exploration of slime, or soap, or frosting in these videos that scratches a need to learn about how those materials behave,” Emma Barratt, a British psychology researcher who wrote one of the earliest papers about the autonomous sensory meridian response, told me.
“Getting that information may be what’s innately satisfying.”
Whatever the neuropsychological explanation, it’s clear that Oddly Satisfying videos serve as a form of self-care, to use another term that has spiked in recent years. While it’s a journalistic cliché to talk about “our anxious times”, it does seem that the early 21st century is doing something to our heads.
Self-reported anxiety rates are high and growing. Geopolitics and economics aside, some of this probably has to do with the Internet itself. Much of the online world is designed to agitate, thriving on fear and anxiety and anger — outrage clickbait, disaster porn, FOMO-(fear of missing out) inducing social media.
The medium itself is stressful, with its red dot alerts and needy open tabs. Oddly Satisfying is everything the rest of the Internet isn’t — soothing, slow-paced, non-interactive, noncommercial.
Unlike other types of self-care, watching Oddly Satisfying videos doesn’t necessitate a yoga studio membership or a snail slime-infused Korean sheet mask or so much as a sip of US$11 coldpressed juice. It doesn’t involve learning to meditate.
All it takes to get oddly satisfied is to learn your own preferences. Just watch a few videos. At first you’ll wonder who the audience could possibly be for something so idiosyncratic. Then you’ll watch a clip of someone shaving a bar of soap with a vegetable peeler, and suddenly you’ll realise you are that audience.
Or maybe you’re a cookie-decorating video person, mesmerised at the sight of royal icing piped in mandala-intricate configurations to the sounds of ambient techno. If slime — a squishy, viscous mixture of glue and Borax — turns out to be your catnip, you’re in luck: Oddly Satisfying slime videos are so prevalent they make the list of YouTube’s top 50 most common search terms.
It’s telling, I think, that “satisfying” is the chosen descriptor for the genre. We’ve grown used to jazzier adjectives — hilarious, awesome, amazing, absolute genius. In comparison, “satisfying” feels at first underwhelming. But “to satisfy” means to give you exactly what you need or want. How often do we get that? Even for the length of a 10-minute video. Even though we don’t know why. Even if it involves watching action figures being melted on a waffle iron.
Whatever the neuropsychological explanation, it’s clear that Oddly Satisfying videos serve as a form of self-care.