In addition to the second uncle, there are tape balls to cure young people’s internal friction

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The pressure of young people is becoming a business. Short videos such as squeezing slime, cutting tape balls, and cutting soap with the label of “unzip” are played by millions on station B and Kuaishou, and become the traffic password of the platform. For young people, can decompressing videos really decompress them?

Author | Zhao Ruoci Editor | Liu Yang

Source: Leopard Change

When mental internal friction becomes a mood of the times, healing becomes a need.

A few days ago, the video “Three Days Back to the Village, My Second Uncle Healed My Mental Contrails” went viral all over the internet. Many netizens with spiritual strength. The four words “spiritual internal friction” have also become a hot word at the moment.

In addition to the second uncle, the young people on station B also have various methods to solve mental internal friction, such as rubbing slime with hands, slicing soap into flakes or granules with a knife, cutting a tape ball, and dispersing the pieces. Beads dressed as necklaces… These videos can achieve a “decompression” effect in just one or two minutes. They seem boring, but they are easily addictive.

The UP master of station B, Xiong Xiongzhuanqiuqiu (hereinafter referred to as “Xiong Xiong”), is a post-95s generation who gained 52,000 fans in less than a year by making a video of making tape balls. A video she uploaded called “Playing the Ball for Two Months, Cutting the Ball for Two Minutes” has nearly 7 million views. In the video, she gently used a knife to cut a huge ball of tape, which showed distinct rainbow colors. With each cut, the shape and color of the ball of tape changed.

As the title of the video describes, the video, which is less than two minutes long, used more than thirty rolls of tape for one or two hours a day for two months. If you want to ask about the meaning of this type of video, someone answered in the comment area: “It’s meaning to watch it well.”

For young people who are addicted to decompression videos, how addictive are these videos? After watching the video, can mental internal friction really disappear?

Beading, squeezing slime, cutting tape balls

A year ago, going to the decompression hall to release pressure was very popular among young people. In the decompression hall, you can smash keyboards, smash wine bottles, beat your ex, and let go. Although the Internet celebrity decompression hall with decompression as a gimmick has not been popular for a long time, the fancy decompression methods of young people are still emerging one after another.

In the “Decompression Method Research Association” group on Douban, there are more than 20,000 “stress researchers” who share their decompression magic skills. Arranging supermarket shelves, cutting short hair, and sharpening pencils have become new methods for group members to decompress. On Xiaohongshu, search for the entry “decompression”, and there are more than 1.25 million related content, many of which are slightly “exotic” methods such as repairing cow hooves, squeezing acne, and cleaning up dandruff.

On short video sites, “decompression” also seems to be a traffic password.

Li Li, who has just entered the workplace for a year, is still trying to adapt to the rhythm of her work. Recently, when she is busy at work, it is difficult to squeeze time to reply to WeChat. Although she is very tired every day, before going to bed at night, she always turns on her mobile phone and watches a video of beaded beads for a while.

Watching decompressed short videos, the pursuit is a state of mindless. Li Li told “Leopard Change”: “Watching the video of stringing beads only needs to be in a daze. Even the simple process of pouring beads into a plate, different beads and plates of different materials will produce different collision sounds, which is very enjoyable. .”

Under the background sound of rustling, beading bloggers either organize and store beads of different styles and colors of the same color, and the beads fall down and enter the storage box in a regular manner. Or after careful matching, thread different beads into the fishing line one by one, and finally complete a necklace.

From the beads themselves, to the manicure leaked in the video, and the small video on the hand when stringing the beads, it needs to be carefully designed, and every corner exposed in the video is a reflection of the blogger’s taste.

If it is said that wearing beads together to make a bracelet or necklace gives people a sense of “completion”, then “squeeze” a flat slime with your hands, and the theme is “destruction” “.

Slime comes from the English “Slime”, which means a slimy, mucus-like object. On the short video platform, many videos of squeezing and decompressing slime have more than one million views. It looks like a simple “pinch of mud”. In fact, the classification behind it is very particular.

The post-00s slime enthusiast Xiao Hu told “Leopard Change” that slimes are generally made of liquid glue or white glue. According to different water content, they can be divided into solid glue, water pool, and fake water. Different glues are pinched together. The feel is different. For example, the surface has many pores and is called cotton mud; the transparent one is crystal mud; the surface has a layer of hard shell, and when you poke the inside, it is soft called iceberg mud… The diverse feel is slime. One of the reasons people are addicted.

In addition to squeezing colorful and various forms of slimes, there are also various ways to play the tape ball.

In the video of “Pimple Squeeze Simulator” produced by Bear Rolling Ball, there is a large smooth, golden ball, and a small opening is gently cut, and the water baby hidden in it rushed out. In another video of “Salted Duck Egg Tape Ball”, Xiong Xiong made a crystal clear duck egg, gently cut open the transparent “egg white”, and the orange duck yolk inside was as realistic as it was about to flow oil.

Someone left a message under “Salted Duck Egg Tape Ball”, “There is appetite and fireworks”, “I thought which food blogger has researched some new food”.

From a psychological point of view, such decompressed short videos can temporarily distract people. And when people have negative emotions in their hearts, they eventually need some way to vent them out. Watching “destructive” videos like scraping soap, squeezing slime, or cutting tape balls has a kind of projection psychology, which is equivalent to projecting your inner emotions and letting others vent for you.

Psychological consultant Jing Tong told “Leopard Change”: “This kind of video may be very refreshing to watch, but when you don’t watch this kind of video, the pressure and negative emotions in the subconscious may be more inflated. So instead of just watching others It’s better to do it yourself.”

Relieve small pressure, spend big money?

On short video websites, videos of cutting soap, squeezing slime, and cutting tape balls not only have a lot of traffic, but also drive a group of young people to buy materials and experience a boring “sweetness” with their own hands.

“The post-90s generation played beading as a child, but now beading bloggers joke that it is the same group of people who play this thing, it’s just that we have grown up.” Li Li is watching countless bloggers’ beading videos After that, I decided to buy my own materials to try to make necklaces. Taobao, Pinduoduo, 1688 and other platforms all have similar merchants. The price of the beads themselves is not expensive. Millet beads with a diameter of several millimeters can be bought in a small box for one or two pieces, and a little more special beads are only one or two pieces a piece. particles.

At the beginning, she only spent about 200 yuan, and planned to buy some materials to try. After entering the pit, it was out of control. Now Li Li has spent nearly 3,000 yuan to buy all kinds of beads. “Beaded accessories are actually very cheap. For example, a few dollars of fishing line can be used for a long time. But after I really started playing, I found that I would keep buying beads if I wanted to make different styles. The money is spent when I feel like it.”

When she first started playing beads, Li Li really got the feeling of “decompression” from it. She sat at the table for an hour or two while playing a song, only focusing on the colorful beads in front of her. There are more and more finished products, and Li Li uses part of it to match her own clothes, and the other part is used to give to friends, which does produce some sense of accomplishment.

But after a long time, Li Li found that beading has become her new source of pressure. Sometimes she bought a few very beautiful beads, and if she wanted to use other combinations, she had to buy new ones, like a bottomless pit. Recently, Li Li has stopped buying and buying. She plans to use up the beads in her hand and set up a stall to try.

After decompressing the beads, maybe you can have a few necklaces and bracelets of your own, but some people spend hundreds of thousands of yuan just to “pinch” or “cut a few knives”.

Search for slime on Taobao, and the price ranges from ten to thirty yuan. In the comment area, buyers will attach pictures and videos to share the smell, texture, whether it can be brushed, whether it is foaming, etc. of different slimes.

After Xiao Hu swiped Slime’s video on the video website, he also began to “chop his hands”. So far, she has spent more than 7,000 yuan, including purchasing the finished slime and the raw materials used to make the slime.

Xiao Hu bluntly said that he was “very unrestrained”. During the epidemic at home, he bought slime to play when he was bored. From the beginning of buying finished products, to later buying glue, glycerin, borax water and other raw materials to make his own, Xiao Hu has become half a slime expert.

Some people spend money to “knead the mud”, and some people spend money to “cut the ball”. Searching for “tape ball customization” on Xianyu, you can find that many users take orders to make tape balls on it. Depending on the circumference, the price of the tape balls varies.

Adhesive tape balls include the cost and time cost of buying the tape. Two days ago, Xiong Xiong just received an order. She charged 80 yuan to make three balls with a circumference of 25 cm. According to the customer’s request, Xiong Xiong filled the tape balls with clay and water babies.

She told “Leopard Change” that this kind of tape ball with fillers can be made faster, and it takes about an hour to wrap it up, and the cost is about a few dollars. Before the customer cuts the tape ball, he actually does not know what is inside Appearance, quite the pleasure of unpacking the blind box.

Xiong Xiong once made a tape ball with a circumference of 45 cm, and used more than 30 rolls of tape for one or two hours a day for two months. On Xianyu, you can search for a user to post a custom-made solid tape ball with a circumference of 49 cm, which is directly priced at 500 yuan.

For sellers, sticky tape does require craftsmanship and time. But for buyers, payment is only a one-shot decompression.

Your stress, my business

When emotional catharsis becomes a demand, the decompression economy is formed.

When she was in elementary school, it was popular among Xiong Xiong and her classmates to wrap the sticky adhesive layer inside the tape into a ball. For her, the tape ball carries childhood memories.

Last summer, Xiong Xiong casually shared a photo of his tape ball on Xiaohongshu, and many netizens left messages expressing curiosity. So starting from sharing the tutorial, Xiong Xiong gained his first batch of fans. After the continuous update at station B, Xiong Xiong started his side business. In the past, the creative incentive of station B was very high. The videos with more than 2 million views were divided into seven or eight thousand yuan, which directly exceeded his fixed salary of about 2,000 per month in the village committee.

The video of cutting the tape ball looks very simple. You only need to use a sharp knife to cut the tape ball. But behind the video in a few minutes, Xiong Xiong also put in a lot of effort, from color, creativity to post-editing. In Xiong Xiong’s little red book collection, there are various color cards and color combinations. She needs to study what color to cut out to be comfortable.

She told “Leopard Change”: “The tape on the market may only have a few fixed colors, but many people ask why there are so many colors in my tape ball. In fact, I painted it bit by bit with a marker.”

For the post-editing, Xiong Xiong also strives for perfection, and it must be cut to the most comfortable and satisfactory before it is released. In addition to the most basic solid tape balls, Xiong Xiong also thinks of various creative ideas. For example, in the video of “Jet Kirby”, she made the image of the Nintendo game “Star Kirby” into a tape ball, which was sprayed out after cutting it. colorful water baby.

In the first half of this year, Station B has greatly reduced the creative incentives for UP owners, and Xiong Xiong now only earns about 6 yuan from 10,000 broadcasts. Although the income of doing UP has decreased, before this, Xiong Xiong quit his original job and started his own e-commerce business in Yiwu. She opened a stationery store on Pinduoduo, which included special tape for sticky tape balls. Xiong Xiong said that the tape ball suddenly became popular this year, and even supported many tape manufacturers.

Compared with the tape ball that became popular this year, slime has an earlier rise in China, and the industry is more mature. But when the circle gets bigger, a series of problems also arise.

Slime players formed a circle called “mud circle”, and slime sellers were called mud po. Many slimes are active on Kuaishou, posting videos on Kuaishou, allowing players to intuitively feel the texture, color, packaging, etc. of each slime, and then divert players to their own micro-stores to buy.

It is understood that some mud po fans are not many, but the quality is very good. Many times their products even need to be robbed.

There is a huge interest behind selling slimes. The glue that Xiao Hu bought for making slime can be bought for about 130 yuan for 4 liters, five pounds of glycerin about more than 50 yuan, and one kilogram of borax about more than 10 yuan. Calculated, the homemade slime can be made 4 to 5 liters for about 200 yuan. If you wholesale in large quantities, the cost will be lower.

However, the price of the finished clay is more than 20 yuan for the most common 100 grams. Open the relatively well-known Nipo Waner’s micro-shop, there are more than 350,000 fans, and the sales of many popular slimes in it are more than 10,000.

In addition to winning by quality, there are also many bloggers on Kuaishou who rely on character design or eye-catching. Xiao Hu told “Leopard Change”: “The decompression economy is about to become the rice circle economy. Some bloggers will add more luxurious skin care products such as fairy water and sea blue mystery facial cleanser to slime to increase the price. Some Pos set themselves up as rich second-generation characters, and they will sell for a lot of money. Many in this circle are students, and those in elementary and junior high schools will worship blindly.”

Where there is demand, there is business. Then, when decompression becomes a business, and consumers use the money earned under pressure to decompress, can they really solve their own problems?

Jing Tong told “Leopard Change” that in order to truly relieve stress, you first need to explore the source of stress by yourself. For people who are more stressed, the general solution is to learn to accept themselves first and accept that they are beyond their power in many things. When you have negative emotions, don’t suppress yourself. Shouting and crying have a certain effect. Usually doing some high-intensity exercise, such as Muay Thai and swimming, is conducive to promoting the formation of dopamine.

In addition, Jing Tong also mentioned a very important point: “We must reduce the time spent on the Internet and watching videos, and invest time in doing real things.”

(At the request of the interviewee, all pseudonyms are used in the text)

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