You don't have to carry 64oz of water everywhere you go
You will survive
I do not know when it became de rigueur to carry a gigantic water bottle everywhere you go. I think it might have really taken off during “the pandemic,” when society’s always-latent germaphobia became a full-blown psychomania and everyone stopped drinking from water fountains at all. That’s a shame, because water fountains are great. There’s nothing quite like slurping water from a water fountain. Fresh, crisp, cool water in an unlimited stream, for free—that solves like 70% of the crises that have afflicted humanity for 10,000 years. And they’re great fun to operate. I love to compare the various types of water fountains and think about which one is the best. For my money nothing beats a tall blocky cabinet fountain topped with a fountain with the little plastic turn-knob, what the industry calls a “dial-a-drink bubbler,” with that wonderful tension on the pull and what’s usually a high level of pressure with an adjustable stream. What wonderful machines!
Alas, water fountains have been replaced by water bottles. Everyone takes them everywhere. Okay, look, by “everyone,” I mean mostly women. Let’s not be shy about this. It’s mostly a lady thing. You see some men carrying around water bottles but I would say that increasingly most women carry water bottles around. But the phenomenon is reportedly spreading: My reliable sources tell me that schoolchildren increasingly lug huge water bottles to school with them, bringing them from classroom to classroom, guzzling them constantly. Okay, so it’s a women-and-children thing. Maybe that’s why the “women and children first” rule got started on sinking ships about 150 years ago: The women and children had the potable water. No sense in abandoning ship if you’re leaving the water behind.
But seriously: This is a very odd thing. It’s very much a cultural zeitgeist. You just didn’t see this level of water-bottle-carrying back in the day. To be sure, water bottles as we know them today didn’t really exist until the middle of the 20th century. But that’s a long time: Nalgene bottles first came about in the 1970s. That’s fifty years at this point. But we didn’t have huge numbers of people carrying around water bottles quite literally everywhere until the last half-decade or so, maybe a bit longer. Something has shifted in the popular consciousness to the point that everyone—okay, again, mostly women and now increasingly children—are just lugging them everywhere. Even to other people’s houses! Houses, which in modern America generally come equipped with both unlimited drinking water and plenty of cups and glasses with which to drink it.
Well, look: It’s just really inconvenient to bring those bottles everywhere. I am not sure how anyone lugs a water bottle everywhere, indoors and outdoors, all the time, without going nuts. It’s clunky and cumbersome. You gotta find somewhere to put it. You gotta make sure it doesn’t spill. You gotta refill it regularly or else there’s no point at all. You gotta wash it. You gotta make sure it doesn’t get lost. All of this would be justifiable if there were a genuine need for taking a reusable water bottle everywhere. Like, you know, if you live in the Gobi desert, or if you are a stevedore on an Egyptian loading dock. But if you are just going to work or school in a normal 21st century American building, there is legitimately no need to do this. You have unlimited, free, highly potable and drinkable water pretty much within your reach at all times, literally 24 hours a day. You do not need to take your own water bottle around to get at it.
There has been some protracted discussion about this on social media over the years, and one thing that water bottle advocates like to argue is that people need to carry water bottles everywhere or else they’ll “get dehydrated.” There is a popular perception, bolstered by pop physiology and the occasional Good Morning America segment, that everyone is always essentially teetering on the edge of dehydration and that if we don’t carry the water around with us we’ll all slip into hypovolemic shock and get very sick and maybe die. Well: I was alive in the 1990s, as were many of us, and there weren’t that many water bottles around back then, and we did fine. I don’t recall any of us being chronically dehydrated on a regular basis. I think I recall one kid, during a hot soccer match or something, passing out because he hadn’t drunk enough water. But that wasn’t a problem of access; there was a big old seat top cooler brimming with Gatorade a few feet away and he just hadn’t used it. The rule back then was unspoken but pretty widely understood to be: If you’re thirsty, drink. If not, wait until you’re thirsty, and then drink. And that’s what we all did and honestly we weren’t all dehydrated. We were fine. If we were all getting constantly dehydrated back then, someone would’ve noticed and done something about it. The problem never came up because it wasn’t a problem and it isn’t now.
There are, of course, times when a water bottle is appropriate. Pregnant and nursing mothers need more water than the average mortal, so it could make sense for them to haul those bottles around. It also makes sense at sporting events and other rigorous activities, in large part so you don’t have to break out a stack of crinkly, crumply paper cups that get thrown all over the playing field within 10 minutes. It might make sense on a long car trip, too, maybe. But in general it’s just not necessary—it’s just another thing, another inconvenient tchotchke to drag around and deal with and eventually lose and have to spend more money to replace. This phenomenon needs to die a quick and ugly death. We need to bring up the next generation of kids to be okay with not having water within six inches of their hands at all times, 24 hours a day. Any president who runs on this platform will get my vote no questions asked. When it comes to water bottles I am absolutely a single-issue voter.