Restoration Videos are Hypnotic

 

After I watched one restoration video, my stream was flooded with a million more suggestions just like it. This alone is not surprising. But what I noticed was that of the myriad other suggestions, no two were from the same channel. That was a shock.

And you can tell that someone, somewhere, at some point in the past cracked the code because they're all following the same formula. Firstly, no talking. At no point in the video should you hear a human voice. If something needs to be communicated, it must be by text or gesture. Secondly, no humans (other than hands and arms). Secondly, no music, even for montages. The only sounds we hear are, first and foremost, the sound of the parts and tools and then secondly, occasionally, the ambient environment.

The effect is obvious. This is ASMR, this is the tranquility of Bob Ross meets the power tools of Norm Abram, this is oddly satisfying. This is that genre of videos that I don't know the name of which are pleasurable because they go from disorder to order. If you know the term for that, let me know.

One of the ways you can divide children (or people) is between those who are more interested in people and those who are more interested in things. Those who are more interested in people become nurses, teachers, social workers, etc. The people interested in things become engineers, inventors, mechanics. It's clear these videos appeal to the thing people in the extreme.

The most magical part of these videos is the sandblasting. You take the cruddiest, most decayed rusted metal and you think it's only fit for the trash and then you wave the sandblaster over it and it's like new - exactly like a magic wand. It's oddly satisfying, it's hypnotic. The second best part is the compliment to the sandblasting - powder coating (painting) the new, bright, shiny color.

The genre goes is a few directions. Most I've seen are old toys like the video above but there are also plastic toys from the 80s and 90s, electronics restorations (playstation, nintendo, etc) antique restorations (sowing machines, harvesters, cash registers), general machines (parking meters, intercoms, slot machines) and, of course, car restorations.