Pillow Talk
About seven or eight years ago, I needed to buy a new computer. By that point, my old computer had been in service for so long that if by any off chance the machines chose that month to rise up and overthrow humanity, it wouldn't have been able to contribute much to the movement beyond sitting on the porch and wistfully telling stories about the dark time before the revolution, causing the young 'uns listening intently at its foot pads to either cry or join the cause as soon as they were old enough to wield a defective CD burner with deadly accuracy. That's how I described it's condition when I tried to sell it on Craigslist, anyway.
My old computer was a MacBook, and I was looking to replace it with another one, as I'd become entrenched in the Apple ecosystem after pirating a staggering amount of software that wasn't Windows compatible. It would have involved far too great an investment of time and potential lawsuits to shift back to Windows, so I figured I was better off investing in a machine that was designed with the morally dubious creative professional in mind. Plus, as we all know, the most important factors to consider when buying any new electronics are how closely they resemble a low-budget 1950s spaceship, and how unlikely it is that your mother might want to borrow it.
Of course, a computer isn't something you buy every day, especially not when you're in the early stages of paying off a student loan that is infinitely more valuable than the liberal arts degree for which it paid. So I approached the subject with all the care and consideration that one might put into orchestrating a particularly large drug deal in an 80s action movie. I carefully researched ever detail, angle, and scenario until I was absolutely certain that there was no margin for error. My plan was foolproof, and I had successfully picked out the perfect over priced pipe dream to foolishly squander my newfound credit line on. It was the perfect combination of relatively-low cost (relative, that is, to the cost of legally acquiring an actual human arm and leg) and shoulder-killing weight that could only be pitched as "light" by someone who masocistically enjoys watching a human spine compressed under the strain of unreasonable expectations. I knew the size, the specs, and where to get the best deal on a refurbished machine. It was all set. But like any good drug deal that might result in an even better popcorn fueled shootout, it had one fatal flaw: I wasn't sure what kind of screen to get. At the time, Apple was still offering matte finishes on their laptop screens, and I didn't know if those or the newer glossy screens would give me better color accuracy for video work. I had never seen a glossy screen in person, and wanted to make absolutely sure that I was making the absolute right decision to regret for the next decade or so.
This conundrum could have easily been solved by going to a store and looking at the two options side by side. But like anyone who grew up in the nascent internet age, the idea of going to a place where I might have to talk to a person seemed utterly absurd when I could just as easily spend months speculating and sifting through endless internet articles written by people whose only qualification was their ability to change the default background on their blog. Naturally, that is exactly what I did.
I spent weeks obsessively scouring the internet for reviews from any source I could find, preferring to trust the unvetted opinions of anyone with an internet connection fast enough to upload blurry photos of a screen blown out by a camera flash over a real life retail employee with at least as much professional training as can be gleaned from a day of new hire paperwork and a mandatory sexual harassment seminar. But owing to my inability to craft a more useful search term than "which mac better?", a query that primarily yielded detailed comparisons of Easy Mac vs standard Kraft Dinner, I wasted countless hours wading through pages and pages of utterly useless results.
One thing I did find, however, was a phrase that I'd never heard before, which kept coming up with perplexing regularity: "Unboxing Video." The later 2000s was a gloriously naive time in my life when I couldn't conceive of a world in which people would find the removal of packaging to be an event worth documenting, much less sharing, so when I first came across the term, I couldn't begin to guess what it might mean. For anyone who may be fortunate enough to remain unfamiliar with the term, unboxing videos are more or less exactly what they sound like. They are videos of people taking things, usually expensive electronics...out of a box. For anyone waiting with bated breath for the exciting part, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that was it. A typical unboxing video is little more than something you can't afford shedding it's box like a butterfly emerging triumphantly from its chrysalis, except that the only change that has taken place is that your life has become several minutes shorter. There were no reviews, and no commentary beyond how nicely the packaging may be designed. Just things in boxes, followed by things next to boxes. These videos are essentially porn for people without disposable incomes, a superficial way to experience the basic idea of something you crave while missing out on the best part.
As I scrolled through page after page of inane, joyless unwrapping, like an endless sea of disappointing Christmas mornings captured on home movies that even the most lenient film critic would be hesitant to round up to "amateur,'" all I could think was, "Do people actually watch this shit?"
Turns out, the answer was a very definitive yes. And even more depressingly, it turns out that I am one of them. As the years roll on, more and more of my major purchases involve the ritualistic watching of enough unboxing videos to make my wife insist I buy something so that our YouTube browsing history won't read like the mind of a deranged shrink wrap fetishist. Phones, computers, headphones, tents, vacuum cleaners, replacement filters for vacuum cleaners, air conditioners, cheap air conditioners, the box fan I ultimately bought when I realized that there's no such thing as a truly cheap air conditioner, and, on at least two separate occasions, an umbrella. Before I commit to spending my hard earned money on anything, I like to know exactly what is in store for me, down to the most superficially irrelevant detail. It's another byproduct of the internet age, a way to feel like you have done your due dilligence without all the hassle of actually doing it.
I'm not proud of my unboxing habit, but like anyone with a chronic bad habit, I've found a way to rationalize myself. Whenever I catch myself on YouTube for longer than it would take to earn the money to actually buy the thing that I'm looking at, I tell myself that I am gaining valuable knowledge about a product by seeing how it is experienced by the average consumer. Or at least, that's what I told myself until a few weeks ago, when I found myself watching unboxing videos (yes, plural), of a brand new, state of the art, award winning 2017 model...sigh...pillow. That's right, I dedicated a solid thirty minutes of my life to finding and watching documented evidence of multiple strangers opening a box, and removing...sigh...a pillow. Which I think is the point at which you have to admit that your time isn't valuable, and you don't have any original thoughts. Because there's not much information to be gained from watching someone take a pillow out of a box, giving it a few tentative test squeezes, and authoritatively proclaiming that it is, in fact, soft. I mean, if I want to be generous in my own assessment of my time, I might argue that the size of the pillow relative to the box it comes out of might offer some insight into how squishy it is, or how well it retains its shape after prolonged pressure. But a slightly more accurate assessment might be that I wasted a good chunk of my day taking in the opinions of a slew of middle-aged single men in undecorated bedrooms, talking to a camera because they don't have wives to listen to them prattle on about their theories on head comfort. Not to disparage the single life, of course. Like a ten cent packet of ramen noodles, it has it's time and place, that time mostly being when your adult life is either just beginning, or going spectacularly badly. But if there's one advantage to being married, one thing that you can only ask from someone who truly loves you and is committed to sharing a life together in good times and in bad, it's the knowledge that you will always have someone to listen your boring observations about support vs. sinkability ratios with at least the bare minimum of interest necessary to qualify as "feigned." My wife may not find every thought that comes out of my mouth riveting, but she will always show me the courtesy of tuning into my rants just enough to nod politely when context clues tell her that I have probably finished saying something that I am inexplicably passionate about, providing just enough validation for my feelings that I won't have to bother the internet with them.
In my defense, these weren't just unboxing videos. Not as I first encountered them, anyway. The medium has come a long way since I discovered it, and most people will make at least some effort to couple the unveiling of product with something that loosely resembles a review. One man tried to recreate the natural experience of using a pillow by laying down on a sheetless mattress and simulating various common sleeping positions. Spoiler alert, the pillow was acceptably comfortable in all of them, and if this is really how he sleeps, in a brightly lit bedroom with a camera rolling, then this man must have the most boring home movies of all time. Most people didn't go to quite such extreme lengths to demo their product, though. They'd just give a few test pokes and universally reach a conclusion such as, "Yep...that's a nice pillow." But my favorite review was from a fellow who went so far as to note that the pillow is "pretty much all you get. There are no accessories or anything." Which begs the question, what exactly constitutes an accessory for a pillow? A pillow case? A matching duvet cover? Surely he can't have been expecting a USB cable or wall adapter, unless this is a much fancier pillow than I was expecting, and requires frequent charging to maintain optimal levels of support?The more I watched these videos, the more I felt an overwhelming sense of sadness. Which isn't an entirely unusual experience when spending time on the internet, of course. Most days it seems like the primary function of the internet is to ensure that middle schoolers around the globe have no reason to feel good about themselves, so it's not exactly a wellspring of positivity. But even more so than usual, my online session left me feeling hopelessly morose. Because if there is one thing I took from the experience of helping tick a few playcounts up into the double digits, it's how difficult it can be to feel connected in a time when it's easier than ever to put yourself out into the world, but nearly impossible to be heard through all the noise. Watching these people pouring their hearts into videos that most would only find interesting when building a wedding registry, or after a particularly traumatic run in with bed bugs, the presentation of a pillow as a salacious object of affection, worthy of an unveiling that borders on idolatry, it just felt like a desperate attempt to be acknowledged, a cry for help calling out into a dark, unfeeling void in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, someone on the other side might be listening. To me, each video I watched seemed less like the banal observations of a man who is genuinely excited about his sleeping arrangements, and more like these tiny, intimate glimpses into a life of loneliness which, by conflating the mundane and the extraordinary, somehow manages to tap into the collective inner monologues of a society that is so fixated on individual comfort that it fails to notice how small and insignificant the experience of an individual truly is. The existence of an entire subculture of pillow unboxing videos did little to assuage my sense that the digital age as a time when our lives are superficially public, yet ultimately unnoticed and forgotten, our opinions on bedding a prime example of something that seems of paramount importance in our own lives despite being completely insignificant to everyone we might be inclined to share them with . And I couldn't help but feel sorry for anyone who is so pitifully alone that they would open up the least interesting moments to the camera in the vein hope that there might be someone out there somewhere who actually cares.
Or it did, until I realized that by now, I'd now spent over an hour watching the same pillow coming out of a dozen boxes, thus proving whatever solipsistic sense of self importance these people might have completely right. And if I'm going to feel sorry for anyone, it should't be the man who wants to talk about his pillow, but the man who will willingly sacrifice an entire Saturday afternoon to listen.
-TC