Scripture 8: You Don't Own Your Water Bottle. Your Water Bottle Owns You.

At cafes. At meetings. At funerals. At weddings. You will find them: grown adults gripping their colour-coded emotional support flasks like they're crossing a desert when in fact they’re crossing the Woolworths parking lot.

Everywhere you turn, someone is sucking on a straw like it’s an oxygen line. “You have to drink 3 litres a day!” they whisper, as if their kidneys are operating under Geneva Convention pressure. Science, it turns out, has said no such thing. But that hasn’t stopped Brenda from treating her 2.2L bottle like an IV drip for the soul.

And let us talk about the bottle itself. It’s never just a bottle. It is:

• Stainless steel, vacuum-insulated, double-walled, sweat-resistant and possibly blessed by a Himalayan monk.

• It must be decorated with stickers that say things like “You got this!” or “Hydrate or Diedrate!” (a charming threat).

• It must be thudded onto a table with a sound that says, I am a person who drinks water, and therefore better than you.

Once, a wise person said, “I’m thirsty,” and solved the problem by finding a tap. Today, thirst is seen as a catastrophic failure of self-care. If your lips feel even vaguely dry, you are one sip away from kidney collapse and moral ruin.

There are people people you know who cannot leave the house without their bottle. Not even for a 10-minute drive. “What if I get thirsty?” they ask, as if city traffic is a dehydration death trap, and not just annoying.

These are the same people who think caffeine is poison, who believe lemon water in the morning is “cleansing,” and who use the word “toxins” with alarming confidence for people who microwave plastic.

The irony, of course, is that the hydration zealots are the most tired, cranky people alive. They drink 3 litres a day and still look like they haven’t slept since 2019. Their skin glows but only because it’s being aggressively exfoliated by self-loathing and SPF 50.

We were promised that all this water would give us energy, mental clarity, and clear skin. What we got instead was the constant urge to pee and a deep psychological dependency on vessels the size of fire extinguishers.

Here’s the truth: The water bottle is not just hydration. It is identity.

Are you the minimalist matte-black bottle? The pastel motivational-timeline bottle that tells you “You’re doing amazing sweetie” at 10AM? The loud, sloshy, slightly mouldy gym shaker that signals you were fit... in 2016?

The water bottle tells the world who you are. And more importantly, who you want to be seen as. Look at me. I am prepared. I am healthy. I am full of water and self-denial.

Ah, and let us not forget the ecological moralism. The reusable water bottle is a badge of honour, a token of eco-enlightenment. “I don’t use plastic,” they say smugly, before hopping into their third Uber of the day and ordering imported coconut water.

You will find them posting thirst traps, literal ones, beside their 1.5L flasks, captioned: Hydration is self-love. Meanwhile, they’ve spent more on water containers than most people spend on actual water.

Final Thought: You Are Not Dehydrated. You Are Just Bored.

If you feel tired, it’s not dehydration. It’s existential dread. If you have brain fog, it’s not low fluid intake. It’s late capitalism. If you’re peeing every 17 minutes, it’s not your body “flushing toxins”... it’s your kidneys filing an HR complaint.

Maybe, just maybe, you don’t need to carry a bottle everywhere. Maybe you could trust that water will exist beyond your front door. Maybe, we could all go back to being just a little less... hydrated and a little more human.

But alas... carry on, thirsty disciple. May your bottle never leak, and your bladder never rest.