A Theory Regarding Those Stanley Cups
When we judge these suburban white women we also judge ourselves.
Stanley Cups discourse has reached peak this week. A few weeks ago a TikTok of a woman whose car was engulfed in flames went viral because the only recognizable item in the charred remains of her SUV was a fully intact Stanley Cup with…unmelted ice?
And that’s remarkable. I mean, it’s obviously a very well-made vessel in a world where every item we are encouraged to consume is poorly made and expected to be replaced within a year.
That said, we’ve reached mass hysteria and I resent a media and social media that has made me aware of any of it. I don’t care about this shit at all. But I have noticed that the judgment of the consumerism and the very suburban, very white women who have made collecting a bunch of cups their hobby is a bit pointed and reductive.
There are critiques that I’ve enjoyed like Matt Lubchansky’s comic (this is only one of the 4 panels but it’s a good question)
Why indeed…
I also love Vinny Thomas’s hilarious TikTok about it.
But can we keep it a buck? And I wanna be clear that I don’t think there’s necessarily any harm in mocking this fad. From the outside it’s just another explosion of consumerism built around something no one actually needs and most of this will simply end up filling out the shores of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (or Trash Island as I lovingly call it).
But it occurs to me that we never really bully men in this way. I mean look at sneakerheads. They’re waking up at the ass crack of dawn refreshing four burner phones to try to get a rare color way of shoes they don’t intend to wear. It’s frankly the same thing, but even more expensive and frivolous. I love when men do their AD home tours and show off a whole room-sized closet of rainbow shoes, romantically labeled and collecting dust.
And even beyond the obviously sexist undertones is the real America of it all. This is a land of hoarders who love hoarding. We’re just a couple generations out from the Great Depression and a variety of immigration influxes. Scarcity culture is real. I’m not commenting from the outside, either. I recently have been on a decluttering bender in my own home, and there are so many things I have duplicates of. I have two giant bags of mini-usb cords that I’m never going to need. I have some cups I got at baseball games and Disneyland. How many mouse ears is too many? No I am not in a glass house throwing stones, I’m being pelted by reality.
So let’s zoom out a bit: it’s 2024. The economy is outwardly doing great, but every consumer product is more expensive than ever. The middle class is shrinking and home ownership is becoming more and more out of reach. There’s an epidemic of loneliness. Everybody’s job is now just “computer” with varying degrees of aptitude. And our time is being colonized down to the minute with scrolling past ads and posts (that might as well be ads) for how to improve our shitty little lives.
Enter: a cup. For a meager $45 investment you too can have something to post about. Find a community to connect to and upon which to comment. Create content around it. And while the irony is not lost on me that a cup that’s virtually indestructible isn’t needed in several colorways and should theoretically be a gateway to using and needing less, this is America. We have big ass trucks to haul nothing, with unnecessarily bright headlights to blind everyone. We can’t just drink water, we have to buy 400 different sodium-packed flavor powders to jazz it up. Minimal and eco-friendly really isn’t our thing. Have you ever seen Ferngully? We’re the big bulldozer knocking down the rainforest and we will never learn.
There just aren’t many meaningful and free ways to connect to people anymore. So c’est la vie. In the grand scheme, it’s going to be a moment in time akin to Beanie Babies, NFTs, and VW Beetles. Maybe some lucky grand kid will inherit hundreds of unique colored cups, and carry a different one or two daily (one for hot bevs, one for cold). Maybe it’ll help someone stay hydrated. Maybe…eh, probably not. But surely we ought to be judging our own cupboards and tendencies before we judge others.
Happy Friday!
p.s.: 2x a week posts coming next week. The year is ramping up, and so am I. TTYL. -A