Fuck Your Stanley Tumbler

And also your plants.

I know. I came out hard and fast with this one.

This post probably should have been titled “An Anti-Love Letter From an Elder Millennial to Gen Z,” but it would still be harder than I intend. And too generalized.

We all know we cannot sum up an entire age band of people within a set of tidy assumptions (right, we know this?!), I'm just trying to be funny. Kind of (did it work?!).

Seriously though, as a person with a bit of a YouTube habit (I say a bit because I keep it under control!), I find myself hyper-amused by the shit younger folks seem to need - or at least what the YouTuber stereotypes are. And specifically how those stereotypes fan their way back out into real life.

I see this a lot in the seeming obsession with plants in younger folks. That said, perhaps this is a 38-year-old tapping into her curmudgeonly side, getting testy because she herself cannot seem to keep the most robust of houseplants alive! Perhaps it's a good thing that this is a younger-person-fad I don't really want to get into. I am perfectly happy with my three long-term houseplants I think I water once every few weeks (even less than I did before kiddo came onto the scene), and my handful of potted outdoor plants that demonstrate the minimum modicum of annual landscape care I've come to expect from myself.

But, ah, the Stanley Tumbler. WHY?! As someone who owns two Hydroflasks (a cute, squat yellow one for my coffee and a larger white one for my water), the 'it beverage containers' (geez, that's a THING?) of five years ago, perhaps I don't get the right to ask this question. But really, I purchased them sheerly out of functional desires, I promise! 

This Stanley Tumbler thing is large. It's ugly. It doesn't seem real functional, at least for MY purposes. But hey, to each their own? I would say it just surprises me the amount of cash people will drop on this shit, but the person writing this is the same person who happily drops $120.00 on a pair of athleisure pants (again, purely functional, I promise!). 

As it turns out, this is just another ramble that affirms the age-old truth that we all indeed live our own lives. I think I just find it amazing that in todays seemingly more and more culturally hegemonic world, we all seem to want to own the same shit to express 'who we are.'

Has it always been thus? I guess all I can do is live a little longer, and a little longer, and keep noticing what I notice to try to get to the bottom of this and other questions.

Will I ever? I sort of doubt it.

Is that totally magical?

Yes. Totally :)