The Last Word On Nothing

Dreading the coming face-plant into January? I am. Cold, dark mornings followed by cold, dark evenings, chintzy decor strung up well past its prime, dirty snow (if any snow at all) heaped under dreary parking lot lighting, long gift-return lines. Nature brown and bare.

Plus, the state of the world. THE STATE OF THE WORLD. The season of long, sunny days can’t get here fast enough.

Until then, one must seek escape. Like many, I am prone to look for it where it’s most readily available. You know the place.

Which leads me to ask, why do rug-cleaning videos on TikTok make me feel a little bit better about the ugly season, the general state of things? Maybe you’ve seen them, usually posted by cleaning companies to drum up business. They go like this: A man (it’s always a man) in black rubber boots unrolls a dirty carpet onto a concrete floor in some warehouse, and the thing is not just dirty but DIRTY, embedded with filth like it’s been marinating in crude oil and sewage in an underground pit for decades. But this is a story of hope, so the man wields a carpet cleaning wand and assorted spinning brushes and bottles of blue soap and a hose and a squeegee. At 3X speed we get to watch him soap up, scrub, rinse, and squeegee the thing over and over, the water starting out mud black and gloopy and ultimately running sudsy white and then crystal clear. The colors and design of the rug slowly appear as when someone peels back old carpet to find gorgeous tile underneath. In the end, the rug looks light, fresh, and new.

These videos stop me from scrolling; even at several minutes long they hold my attention. The final result is part of the thrill, but it’s the process, the progress, that’s immensely satisfying. My brain sops up each step like my mouth would a delicious buttery biscuit. (Egad, that analogy sounds like something AI would come up with.)

Cleaning videos, if nothing else, offer a sense of satisfaction that can be hard to recreate in our own lives right now. Eliminating a bit of grime, even someone else’s, feels like a victory in a time when most of us are struggling to keep up with piles of bills, sticky kids, and personal hygiene. Watching the procedure step wise is just a bonus.

And not to pounce on an obvious metaphor, but when your brain is stuffed with gloom and doom, its healing to imagine scrubbing all the gunk out and washing it down the drain, no?

Then this: Some lucky folks experience much more, a real physical sensation, as they watch other people clean and organize their messes. You’ve heard of ASMR, autonomous sensory meridian response, the oooh ahhh phenomenon that affects some people when they hear whispering voices, gentle taps, the sound of brushing hair, that sort of thing. It can apply to visual experiences, too. Calming, repetitive-action videos showing another human making progress—in this case with scrubbing bubbles—can be as stress-reducing as those sweet, sweet whispers. Euphoric, even.

Different brains respond differently to the different kinds of stimuli, of course. Some of us get little or nothing at all from these sights and sounds, and some—including those with misophonia (low tolerance for certain sounds), autism, and even ADHD—may find them excruciating, studies have shown. But a lucky 10 to 20 percent of us, according to experts, get surprisingly tingly from some form of ASMR. For them a particular visual or audio clip is like a light brush of fingers over the neck and down the back, a goosebumps experience. And studies have shown that in some of those people ASMR actually reduces anxiety and depression as it releases feel-good neurotransmitters. How nice for them.

Of course, it’s all in their heads. ASMR kicks the brain’s visual and auditory cortices into gear; specifically, scientists note that audiovisual stimuli generate activity in the middle frontal gyrus and the left nucleus accumbens, while auditory stimuli affect the bilateral insular cortices. Yes, I stole that info directly from a scientific paper and I don’t claim to know much about those particular brain bits except that they are relevant to things like attention, reward, pleasure, addiction, and integrating bodily sensations with emotion.

Me, I find certain taps and clicks soothing, and hearing/watching little animals munching on crunchy food delights my senses. People whispering into the mic and making mouth noises, not so much.

The carpet-cleaning videos don’t make me tingle all over, but they do pause my mental chaos and seasonal gloom briefly—especially if we’re talking about a rug with layers-deep stains and blood-brown runoff that’s scrubbed into oblivion. Frankly, if a rug wasn’t previously used to roll up an exhumed corpse, it’s probably not worth my time.