‘Oddly satisfying’: what’s behind our drive to collect useless items?

Mariana Conti Schwartz has one daughter, two dogs and 103 stainless steel drinking tumblers. The 40-year-old from North Carolina works from home running her family business, Big Al’s Pub & Grubberia, and likes to match her outfits to her reusable cups. Pink, purple, blue, green and grey “Stanley Quenchers” are lined up like soldiers on clear acrylic shelves across her kitchen; Conti Schwartz estimates she’s spent $5,000 (£3,900) on the lot.

Yet perhaps the most exceptional thing about her exceptional collection is that it is not exceptional at all.

Holli Silva is a 32-year-old stay-at-home mum from Arizona who owns 120 Stanley tumblers. More than 2 million people have watched a TikTok video in which Silva points to her cups, rattling off their names. “Wisteria, Orchid, Abalone, Lilac,” she begins naming her first four purple cups. A minute later, she’s reached the blues: “Iris, Pool, Aqua, Glass.”

Rainbow collections are seemingly on the rise. TikTok is home to numerous consumers who buy the same item in every possible colour – be it 50 Le Creuset cups, 1,000 Bath & Body Works hand sanitisers, 150 pairs of Crocs, 60 Starbucks tumblers or 20 Yeti cool boxes. In my head, I’ve begun calling this “one-in-every-colour capitalism” – the compulsion to buy every iteration of a product, even when new releases don’t offer a change in user experience.

How did it become normal – or at least not abnormal – to own a hundred of something you’d traditionally only need one of? While hyper-consumers are not new, social media has amplified their behaviour, allowing it to influence consumption and production.

•••

“We are great listeners,” says Terence Reilly, global president of the 110-year-old Stanley brand, explaining that the company pays attention to customers online. “One of the most requested colours, we’re going to debut this fall and make a lot of people happy.”

For the first four years after the Quencher model’s launch in 2016, it was available in five core colours. After the product blew up online, Stanley launched 10 new colours in 2021 and today releases limited edition shades “nearly monthly”. Though the company didn’t intend to create collectors, it now caters to them. “We have doubled our business three years in a row.”

One pervasive TikTok clip summarises these voracious appetites. “If I like it, I’ll just grab it in a different colour. If I like it, I’ll just grab it in another colour. If I like it, and they have another colour, I’ll just grab it.” This audio recording has been used to soundtrack over 36,000 videos featuring lip-gloss, corset and Prada headband collections.

Related: Agustina Bazterrica: ‘Capitalism and cannibalism are almost the same’

It’s easy to shrug, to consider this as just a quirk of some people’s personalities. Yet one-in-every-colour consumption is a uniquely 21st-century phenomenon: to understand it is to understand capitalism and the internet. A 2022 study from academics at Mahidol University in Thailand found that the intensity with which someone uses social media is linked to negative shopping behaviours such as impulsive buying and conspicuous consumption. Teens have spoken out about the ways in which influencers drive them to consume; one girl told me in 2018 that after watching YouTube haul videos, “If I wanted something, I would stay up at night thinking about it.”

Examining this phenomenon also enables us to understand our brains and our beings, from the psychology of the “oddly satisfying” to the ways our identities can be branded.

“Some people are the ‘crazy cat lady’. I’m the ‘crazy cup lady’ now,” says Conti Schwartz.

•••

Conti Schwartz didn’t start her collection – TikTok did. In September 2022, she saw a video of someone hunting for a Stanley; she was intrigued by promises it would keep her drinks cold. Shortly afterwards, she bought her first citron-coloured cup.

“I used it for a few days and was like, ‘Oh, I really like it. I’m gonna go get one more so when I’m washing one, I can use the other one,’” she says. “And then I joined a group on Facebook.”

Today, Conti Schwartz moderates her own Facebook group for Stanley “obsessives” – here, 1,500 members buy and trade tumblers, pleading for those they’re “diso” (desperately in search of). Speaking via Zoom in late June, Conti Schwartz concedes with a warm laugh that she could have “made do” with just two cups, but “I just fell in love with them. They make me incredibly happy.”

No matter the holiday or occasion, Conti Schwartz has a cup to match – she also enjoys twinning with her 11-year-old daughter, who owns 13 cups. Every time she uses a tumbler, Conti Schwartz updates an Excel spreadsheet with a cross, “to make sure that I use them all, so that nobody gets left behind”.

Reilly, the Stanley president, has seen first-hand how a social media user will pair the cups “with moods or outfits or ways she wants to present herself for the day”. Different cups, he says, fit different situations – one for work, one for the car, one for fitness class. In 1988, the consumer researcher Russell W Belk first posited that our purchases are part of our “extended self”, arguing “our possessions are a major contributor to and reflection of our identities”.

Collecting, Belk says today, also makes people feel accomplished. “Most people in the world are not at the top of their professions, but the little world of collecting is something where we have a greater chance of success.”

Cary Lee, a PhD marketing student at the University of Newcastle, has researched consumer collecting and found six primary motivations, including achievement, legacy and social membership. Beyond identity and icy water, Conti Schwartz’s collection offers community.

“There is a loneliness factor when you work from home and you’re at home a lot,” she says. Pre-Covid, she began home-schooling her daughter due to fears of bullying and gun violence. Today, she and the five other moderators of her Facebook group talk daily, not just about cups but also about their lives. “Two of us are on a very similar journey for weight loss, three of us work from home, so it’s definitely combating loneliness.”

Still, there is one thing Conti Schwartz can’t explain, and that is why simply looking at her cups makes her happy. “I could sit here for hours and not think of a reason why,” she says.

Evan Malone is willing to have a go. An assistant philosophy professor at Lone Star College in Houston, Malone has been studying the so-called “oddly satisfying” for half a decade. You’ve probably seen those two words hashtagged under videos of coloured sand or carved soap online. Malone posits that the oddly satisfying is an antidote to our “especially noisy” society.

“Our lives are filled with designed objects that are often malfunctioning or uncooperative – our iPhone won’t connect to Bluetooth, our computer freezes up,” he says. As a result, “it feels almost like being in a movie when things are actually working well together. When we experience an oddly satisfying moment, it feels like our lives themselves are designed.”

Malone believes there are oddly satisfying elements in one-in-every-colour consumerism, arguing that companies invite us to “design our own aesthetic life at a cinematic level”, selecting props that represent us like characters in a film.

Conti Schwartz agrees her collection satisfies and “scratches an itch” – she and a friend researched the order of colors in the rainbow to get her display right. In many ways, her collection is personally beneficial – it keeps her calm amid anxiety, and “the hunt” for new releases is fun (she regularly calls up her local Dick’s Sporting Goods to check if their latest shipment has arrived). Yet what’s good for one individual is not always good for the world.

•••

In recent years, Victoria Sepiashvili has grown to feel guilty about her hand sanitiser collection. She owns almost 1,000 bottles from Bath & Body Works – she has a similar number of lip balms, as well as a “large” Nike Roshe sneaker collection and tens of Victoria’s Secret plush dogs.

“There’s a dichotomy between having one of the biggest collections in the world and also having thoughts against materialism,” says the 18-year-old content creator from New York. “I mean, it’s really hypocritical and it’s paradoxical and ironic. But yes, as much as I loved it as a child, now I steer away from it.”

Sepiashvili started her hand sanitiser collection aged eight, after becoming “obsessed” with Instagram videos of older girls reviewing scents. “I think it was the aesthetic of it,” she explains. “It was so colourful with every colour in the spectrum – it just looked very satisfying and fun to play with as a little girl.” Sepiashvili says it became her “dream” to build her own collection and her own following.

Very quickly, hunting for new hand sanitisers became a bonding activity for Sepiashvili and her mum. In 2020, she posted a video of her collection that was watched 13.6m times. Sepiashvili’s dreams came true – today, almost 150,000 people follow her on TikTok – but success is bittersweet. As the teen grew older, she became more spiritual, developing an interest in “more esoteric metaphysical stuff”. She says it “dawned” on her that possessions don’t matter. “We only have one life and things are absolutely not significant.”

Although Sepiashvili tries to avoid posting videos about her collections today, she still feels “a lot of guilt” that her videos promoted “hoarding and maximalism and just things, things, things, things”.

While undoubtedly there have always been consumers who buy every iteration of their favourite product (in 1937, the womenswear company Peck & Peck used the phrase “buy it in every colour” in an advert in Vogue), social media has normalised this behaviour – Sepiashvili wouldn’t have even started her collection without Instagram.

Today, the teen is grateful for her following but laments that it takes “extremities” to get noticed online. While she initially tried to build a following with dancing videos – a dancer from a young age, she describes it as “my blood, my core, my foundation” – they “just never blew up on TikTok”.

“It’s unfortunate but you have to do what people like even if it’s silly, foolish stuff,” she says (her mum would often buy items to complete her rainbow collections even if the product was in a colour Sepiashvili didn’t like). Now that she has built a fanbase, she wants to use her platform to inspire and entertain, and one day hopes to be a motivational speaker.

Yet in the meantime, almost every day scientists warn that overconsumption is killing the planet – if things continue this way, by 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. Sepiashvili is worried about the chemicals in the products she collected, but Conti Schwartz isn’t quite sure what critical commenters mean when they mention the environment. “It doesn’t really make sense to me,” she says. “[The cups] are all still reusable; I’m not throwing them away like plastic water bottles.”

Reusable cups were originally a sustainability initiative – Starbucks offers a $0.10 discount on each order to every customer who brings their own cup. Yet every year, the company launches six new drinkware ranges, and a number of these cups have matching miniature keychains.

During our call, Stanley’s Reilly discusses how sustainable its products are as “over 90% of the Quencher is made from recycled materials”. Noting that 10m Quenchers have been sold globally, he muses: “Think of how many single-use plastic bottles are no longer out there polluting the world.”

I put it to him that when people buy 50 cups instead of one, increased production may tip the scales back, accelerating environmental damage.

“Possibly that’s the case,” he says. “But I think, again, we’re very proud of how sustainable the product is itself. And we’re thrilled that it represents the many ways that she expresses herself throughout her day.”

•••

Why might 1,000 hand sanitisers make our stomachs turn, but few of us react with horror to hundreds of wine bottles in a cellar? This is a question that Gerda Reith wrestles with. As a professor of social sciences at the University of Glasgow and author of Addictive Consumption: Capitalism, Modernity and Excess, Reith is conscious of the role snobbery plays in our value judgements.

“There is a class aspect to this,” Reith says. “And it’s the consumption choices of poorer people that are frowned on.” Reith notes that we rarely bemoan people with bookshelves full of expensive first-edition books, even though they also don’t “need” them and their money could also be put to “better” use. Or, as Nietzsche put it in 1888: “Excess is a reproach only against those who have no right to it.”

Conti Schwartz and Sepiashvili are no strangers to hate – one boy in Sepiashvili’s school called her a “hoarder”. Yet rather than criticising individuals, Reith believes we must look at structures. “What people actually consume and why is the tip of the iceberg,” she says. “The bigger factors – the way industries work, the way governments are set up to depend on the taxation and infrastructure of industries – are more significant.”

Reith is troubled by surveillance capitalism – how the data companies collect allows them to subtly influence consumers. Conti Schwartz didn’t search for a Stanley Facebook group after buying her first two cups – it popped up, she jokes, “because our phones listen to us”.

Equally concerning to Reith are the ways corporations make consumerism feel natural. Both Conti Schwartz and Sepiashvili used the word “serotonin” when talking to me, arguing their collections boosted their happiness hormone. Reith warns that this language is actually a “clever corporate strategy”.

“Corporations love this framing – they say that humans have got inherent desires and inherent needs for collecting or consuming and so on,” she says. “That’s a myth, that’s not the case.” Reith says it only feels natural to us because of the environment we live in: “If you lived in a different environment, you wouldn’t be made up like that.”

Capitalism is so dominant that it’s often hard to imagine a “different environment”. Conti Schwartz isn’t fazed by critics who bemoan overconsumption, because “that’s what makes the world go round. If there weren’t consumers, there wouldn’t be jobs” and “if you don’t work, there’s nothing for us to do. We all can’t just sit here.”

What a different world might look like and how we get there is a subject that can inspire endless dinner party rows. For now, Reith says, “everyone does two things: produce and consume in some way.” In a more equitable world, perhaps everyone would be able to produce creatively, she argues, but for now, many people are tied to boring and sterile forms of production, leading them to “consume creatively” instead.

While Reith doesn’t doubt that rainbow collections can make individuals happy, “the problem is companies will never be satisfied”.

For Conti Schwartz, her cup collection continues to be a source of joy. “There are definitely times where I will think to myself: what am I doing? Why do I have so many of these cups?” she says. But “a few minutes later it diminishes. It’s definitely a back and forth, but they definitely help more than they hinder.”