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The blog that explains and makes peace with the soul

Why are so many things "Oddly Satisfying"? In the genres of things that didn’t exist before the internet age, photos and videos tagged as “oddly satisfying” are up there with both the exceptionally weird, and overwhelmingly wonderful. A term born out of reddit as an attempt to describe the inexplicably pleasing quality that watching some mundane thing could rouse in its viewer, oddly satisfying videos encompass everything from watching pressure washers clean pavements to marbled cake glazing and industrial machines cutting through ice. Defining the oddly satisfying is akin to throwing a scrunched up ball of paper and getting it smack bang in the trash can the first time round. And then watching it as a compilation, over and over and over again. In 2018, we don’t need to be able to explain why we like something in order for it to exist,” says Kevin Allocca, head of trends and culture at YouTube and author of Videocracy. I ask Allocca why he thinks oddly satisfying has become such a huge online phenomenon. “I don’t know if it’s necessarily a thing that’s tied to this moment,” he says. But he believes the change lies in the taxonomy, of now being able to categorise the oddly satisfying. “I think we’ve always had a desire to watch these type of things, but we just didn’t have a language for it. Now we do.”

Explaining why we like anything can be complicated, but within the diversity of oddly satisfying videos on the web we can perhaps find some clues. Unlike the older versions of the oddly satisfying, what these newer videos have in common (aside from the lurid colours and excessive glitter) is a deliberate recreation of visually congruous elements that have no real utility other than to satisfy its viewers. It is purposeful where others before were accidental, but it is also creative. “There is something about finding congruence in visual stimuli that seems to be the value,” says Allocca. “I think people are starting to understand that there is an art to creating things that are oddly satisfying.”

@wired.co.uk https://youtu.be/MC0kZTX34tI

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