The bottle heard 'round the world.

Hey, Meh writer @JasonToon here with a story. The college I went to back in the early '90s was known for its theater department. And beyond their general theatrical demeanor, you could always tell just by looking whether a given student was in the theater department. Because they were required by their faculty to always, always carry a certain thing that nobody else on campus ever, ever carried.

A water bottle.

At some point in the last 20 years, carrying a water bottle around became unremarkable, even expected. A water bottle is listed among the required school supplies for my daughters’ schools, right alongside a book bag and a binder. If ourselves from back then could peer into the future, at a park or office of today, we’d be struck by the ubiquity of water bottles as much as the far more remarked-upon smartphones.

The rise of mobile computing has clear causes and benefits. The technology got cheaper and more powerful. The connected world offers unprecedented information, communication, commerce, and navigation capabilities that seem indispensable now. Their cameras alone have transformed how we experience life itself, and how we communicate that experience.

But aside from a few advances in design, water bottles still do what they’ve always done: carry water.

What happened? I think it’s a confluence of three streams (pun intended unapologetically): increasing health consciousness, increasing environmental consciousness, and decreasing available time and energy for pursuing the first two.

First came the widespread recognition of the importance of hydration. While the whole “eight glasses of water a day” thing is overstated at best, bunk at worst, it’s not going to hurt you, it’s easy to remember, and it will keep you hydrated.

For a while there, people bought a lot of bottled water. But then we started to realize that those bottles that piled up in the recycling bins had to come from somewhere, and had to go somewhere. Recycling isn’t magic: it still uses energy. So the environmentally responsible thing to do became reusing a washable water bottle.

But there are a lot of things that are good for you that people don’t do enough of. Exercise. Get enough sleep. Eat carefully. Those things are at least as important as proper hydration.

They’re also a lot harder. They have costs: in time, in effort, in pleasure. Hydration is practically effortless. Just keep a water bottle by your side through the day and take a slug of it now and then. You’re doing something to keep yourself healthy with a side order of saving the Earth.

“Or so the story goes,” a cynic could say. “People carry water bottles because they want to be seen as someone who’s taking care of themselves, taking care of the planet, taking care of business.”

Yeah. So? All purchasing decisions are driven by a strong element of self-image. That doesn’t make them “not real”. In this case, if you buy a water bottle, it’s easy to do those things you want people to think you’re doing.

Or, as is more often the case, if you buy several water bottles. Keep one in the fridge, one in the office fridge, one in your gym bag, a few more in a drawer for when you leave one behind in a hotel room somewhere or in the drink holder on the treadmill.

And that, of course, is where all this cubicle sociology was heading. Here we’ve got two reasonably well-made water bottles for ten bucks. 24-ounce capacity, one-handed drip-resistant AUTOSEAL drinking, rugged BPA-free Triton plastic: everything you should expect from Contigo. There’s nothing revolutionary about them - except for, you know, how they’ve changed the way we live.