Good for you, you have a ridiculously massive drink bottle

My husband likes to go on late night online shopping binges. He does this because he is a man of inexhaustible energy, and in the quiet hours when the children and I are asleep, he imagines that the world will always be this way and that he will have time to work his job and parent but also master home haircuts, learn a new exercise regime and teach our son phonics.

At 2am, he buys the necessary equipment to realise these dreams and a few days later a delivery driver arrives with three kilos of savoury yeast flakes or a massage table or a passata maker.

Is there any reason to carry around 5 per cent of one’s body weight in liquid? No.Credit: Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Last year, before it became clear that we would never be able to safely leave the house with our children, he became entranced with the idea of family bush walks. Thus, a few days later, there was a knock at the door and four industrial-sized drink bottles arrived at our home. One of them was gifted to me. It presently sits atop my desk because when it is full it is too heavy for me to move.

For his part, my beloved has five drink bottles, each with specific applications and each enormous. Which brings me to my gripe: why on earth are we now carrying around two-litre drink bottles in earnest? Or is everyone else aside from me doing it as a joke?

In their earliest iteration, modern drink bottles were strictly for necessity (smuggling cask wine into the cinema when you are 17 and doing a Lord of the Rings movie marathon). They were small, they were practical, and very little attention was paid to their aesthetics beyond the whacking of a logo on the side of the more deluxe brands.

Then in 2020 the Stanley Cup began its ascent and society was hoodwinked into thinking that it was not only normal, but desirable to carry around 1.1 litres of water at a time. It is now possible to buy a 3.7 litre drink bottle at Kmart, and four and five litre vessels at specialist shops. This is despite the recommended daily water intake remaining static for most of human history.

So, why are we at the evolutionary tipping point with, of all things, water consumption? Why has it become en vogue to carry around 5 per cent of one’s body weight in liquid? Why are we all complicit in this pretence that this is something that should be done when water bottles are, by their very nature, refillable?

Part of me wonders whether it is about conveying the impression of health to others – although, personally, I am not sure I would be convinced. While carrying a huge bottle of water might send a slightly more positive message than carrying around a can of beer or a Slurpee, it can only get a person so far.

There is, of course, the aspiration of wellness, which is a word that seems to refer to things that might be health adjacent or might just be expensive. An enormous drink bottle is the 2024 equivalent of wearing Lululemon activewear to a café or a Garmin watch to an office job. It tells the world that you may look like some narc who just wants to do their accounting job and get on with things, but you do down-low care about something (hydration?).

Which, really, brings me to my thesis about enormous drink bottles. That is, unless, like my foolhardy husband, you are planning to take multiple people out to the bush and keep them alive, you probably don’t need three litres of water on your person, and you are really only carrying it as a sort of virtue signalling.

The enormous suburban drink bottle is there so that it draws a specific type of attention to the owner from like-minded people. It is a type of personal branding akin to mounting a Fight Club poster to the wall in your room at college or putting one of those My Family stickers on the back of your big, stupid SUV. It is intended to convey a message about the type of person you are and your priorities. (In the case of the SUV, the message would be “I only care about my family – suck it, rest of the world”.)

I also think there is some message implicit in the size of them. Maybe things needed to become ridiculous and bloated to tell us something about who we as a people are, or who we want to be.

Having reached the zenith of idiocy (surely?), perhaps we will reflect on conspicuous and pointless consumerism, or the cult of capitalism, or how just because someone on the internet gets something doesn’t mean the rest of us need to. Or maybe wee little drink bottles will come into fashion because of TikTok, and then in a few years we will all laugh at the trend that was and how impractical and heavy it all was?

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