Oddly Satisfying

What is satisfaction?  If you ask Google to define it, the definition it gives first is "fulfilment of one's wishes, expectations, or needs, or the pleasure derived from this" which covers quite a few things.  What interests me most however is the idea of pleasure derived from your expectations.  I've wrote about YouTube videos before that are quite pleasurable to watch, mostly in the context of ASMR, however, there are other videos, completely unrelated to ASMR that provide similar feelings although not tingly, they do still evoke a pleasure that can be rather addictive.

There's one such series of videos that share titles to the effect of "the most satisfying video" their content varies quite a bit.  What all of these videos have in common however is a shared rhythm, precision, and repetition.  Some involve humans working, but most focus on machines, production lines, automation etc where the same task is completed over and over, with the same precision and the same pace throughout.  The consistency appeases you expectations and it is like your mind has turned into a dog and someone has sat down and started stroking it.

There are also antagonistic videos that purport to be the most unsatisfying video that show the exact opposite, things going wrong, breaking, dominoes that don't continue their chain, Rube Goldberg Machines that don't actually work, and many more.

There's something oddly satisfying about seeing everything move exactly the way you expect it to, and the consistency with which that action repeats.  I wanted to know why this was the case, if there was some psychological reason behind why these videos are so satisfying to watch, and unfortunately I wasn't able to find anything conclusive.  Despite my best efforts googling the topic and looking for research papers, there was nothing I could find that aptly described what those videos were and the effect they have.

To that end I have a theory as to why they are satisfying.  I believe when we look at things in general whatever they are, whether still or video based, our brains try to process the content and make it orderly and organized.  The more chaotic the visual stimuli is the more the brain has to work to process it.  I believe that the reason these videos and images of symmetry and perfect precision all provide such satisfaction is simply that they provide the least effort to process.  Everything in a neat and tidy order is makes processing it swift and efficient.  In many ways you could consider this to be a mental representation of the difference between a fragmented and a defragmented hard drive, when the latter is achieved there is much less effort needed to retrieve anything you want from it.

I don't have any evidence to back this up, but what this represents in a way is an example of things that are "ungoogleable" in other words, language in itself is inefficient at describing what you want to find and as a result it becomes very hard to search for through search engines like Google because despite the idea that those search engines help you discover things, the reality is you have to know what to search for in the first place if you want to use them to find anything.  Google in this regard is a courier, not a curator.  It fetches what you ask it to, it doesn't present content to you that you didn't ask it for - except for adverts and the plethora of Google services they try to sell you.

Even ASMR although unrelated, it too experienced the same problem.  Most people who watch videos of it now, experienced it long before they knew what it was, and until it was given a name and knowledge of it became more widespread, it was very difficult to search for.  Searching for things like "tingly videos" and "tingling sensation" among many other terms wouldn't have proven very fruitful up until a few years ago when ASMR gained the traction and the exposure that it did which caused the community that centres around it to emerge.

I have to wonder what name or point of reference will emerge in time for these types of oddly satisfying videos and whether it will have similar success of whether it will remain an obscure interest.  The Internet is an unpredictable place at times so there's no real way to predict any of this with certainty.