How to buy a water bottle
It seems like you’re thirsty. I get it! You’re active, doing lots of cool stuff, and you’re a human. Humans need to drink a lot water every day – more than you would expect.
Of course you could enlist a glass for the purpose of your hydration needs. Classic move. Love it. But then you’re on the go, and what then? And a glass can be knocked over, and then your water goes everywhere: disaster. What could possibly solve this?
Enter the category of water bottles. Water bottles do basically what a normal twist-top Coke bottle does, only with a cap that generally prevents spillage and allows for travel carry. Water bottles are also durable & washable, allowing you to keep one around, with enough maintenance, for many years.
I’ve bought three water bottles in my life. The first was a plastic Nalgene that I owned for 12 short years. Then I got a Kleen Kanteen that I used exclusively for another 9 years, and which I now keep as a smaller travel bottle. My primary water bottle is now a Purist, which is a bit of an expensive purchase but it’s really a joy to use, and if I’m going to use something every day, I can spend another twenty bucks on it.
You need precisely one water bottle, and you need it to be the biggest possible one that you can conceivably carry. That way, you minimize the number of refills over the course of your day. I like having a smaller water bottle for travel and the big one for my daily use. That way, I can throw my smaller bottle in my sling and have it when I’m at the yoga studio or out with friends. Convenient!
Since water bottles are durable objects that are usually made of metal or plastic, you obviously never want to buy more than, like, seven water bottles across your whole lifetime. Anything more than that would be unhinged chaos behavior, indicative of a profound psychospiritual impoverishment, easily worthy of intervention. Can you even imagine someone who would do such a thing on purpose, outside of those who might frequently lose or damage their water bottles? The mind reels at the mere conceptualization of such an idea, and so we must not consider it any further.
At the same time, there appear to be many brands of water bottle, so it might be hard for you to figure out what to go for. Really you should just get a big metal water bottle with a screw top that won’t leak. That’s it. Those are the design parameters. This narrows your options to, like, ten. You want to not think about your water bottle. Your water bottle is infrastructure, like water. Clean your water bottle with a nice long brush and hot water every couple of weeks, and then replace it next decade. Set a calendar reminder to do this, so you don’t forget! And then you will have a new water bottle. Enormous day.