Let's Give It Up for Vicks Sinex Moisturizing Nasal Spray!

May we celebrate what works!

Two combatants have waged a bitter war upon my columella for the past year. In one corner: My roommate’s cat, Fiona, to whom I am mildly allergic. To assuage these allergies, I use Budesonide nasal spray once daily. Though, as my doctor told me, Budesonide doesn’t rely on shrinking blood capillaries in the nostrils to the extent that Fluticasone does, it can still leave one vulnerable to nosebleeds, particularly during dryer seasons. Unfortunately, we’re into the part of the year in which dry air comes about and reveals itself in the other corner. Each contest between my allergies and the dry air finishes as a split decision between fighters. Neither wins, but I lose.

I am a little twitchy by nature. One of my recurring tics is to wiggle my nose a bit. This habit now leads me to jar some scar tissue out of place within my nose at random, shooting an annoying sort of manageable but sharp pain through my face throughout the day. This was an astoundingly annoying and nagging issue for a long while, but I found a remedy in the form of Vicks Sinex Moisturizing Saline Ultra Fine Nasal Spray. It works well: Some pain comes about, I apply the spray, and the pain stops.

This shouldn’t be noteworthy, and perhaps it isn’t, but I found it disturbingly abnormal for a product I purchase to immediately solve the problem I purchased it to solve. I write here from what feels like a tedious time of history. Far too few things seem to simply work the way they ought to, and if they do work, I have to get through some tedious red tape to access them. I’ve recognized this phenomenon in bits and pieces, but hadn’t really seen it laid out until I read this excerpt in Ed Zitron’s article “Lost in the Future” yesterday:

Technology is our lives now. We wake up, we use our phone, we check our texts (three spam calls, two spam texts), we look at our bank balance (two-factor authentication check), we read the news (a quarter of the page is blocked by an advertisement asking for our email that's deliberately built to hide the button to get rid of it, or a login screen because we got logged out somehow), we check social media (after being shown an ad every two clicks), and then we log onto Slack (and feel a pang of anxiety as 15 different notifications appear). 

Modern existence has become engulfed in sludge, the institutions that exist to cut through it bouncing between the ignorance of their masters and a misplaced duty in objectivity, our mechanisms for exploring and enjoying the world interfered with by powerful forces that are too-often left unchecked. Opening our devices is willfully subjecting us to attack after attack from applications, websites and devices that are built to make us do things rather than operate with the dignity and freedom that much of the internet was founded upon. 

The experience of using anything online is now defined by constant, nagging interruptions. The website I just linked you to immediately brings up a pop-up prompt asking for an e-mail address. This website probably does the same, and I don’t think that I can turn it off. Most websites do the same thing. I understand why it happens; everyone wants to retain visitors to their site, and offering e-mail updates helps them to do it. There are many sites (such as Ed’s) to whom I have given my e-mail address. Many websites also have the requisite pop-ups concerning the amount of data a user is willing to give out to them. Others have those video pop-ups that run in the corner of the screen. This practice of interrupting the reading experience is practically ubiquitous, and I’m only talking about individual websites at the moment.

The now-legacy Web 2.0 social media sites have devolved even further. Facebook now primarily offers me excerpts from groups and pages to which I don’t belong amid a slurry of ads and nonsensical videos, though it will, from time to time, show me a post by a friend. Instagram (of course, run by the same company) is the same. YouTube is falling into the same heap - every search almost immediately recommends me videos that I’ve already watched, regardless of their connection to the query that I typed in. The internet is defined by these constant, incessant little nags between me and what I go to the internet for.

There is nothing more annoying to me than the little informative ping. My car does this to me - I turn it on, I put it in reverse, I look at the little screen in the center to see what the backup camera shows. Immediately, every time that I turn the car on, a drop-down notification takes up ~15% of the screen to inform me that nothing is connected via Bluetooth. It stays there for five seconds. I don’t need to know this information. This isn’t even information. It’s notifying me that there’s nothing to notify me about. I already know that the Bluetooth is off; it was I who turned the Bluetooth off to begin with!

To be fair to my Toyota Camry, which I like quite a lot despite this annoyance, it is a 2013 model and I think that more recent iterations of the Toyota infotainment screen software prioritize the backup camera above any other operations that the infotainment screen offers.

To quote from philosophy - It’s not much, but it all adds up, doesn’t it? These little interruptions are absolutely incessant and pervade every technologically-infused facet of modern life. Even the things that aren’t necessarily technologically-infused are interrupted by incessant little buzzes from the phone in my pocket. It’s the pop-up ads even in the apps that I pay to use. It’s six little buzzes within the span of a minute and a half that break my concentration while I’m trying to speak with someone. It’s when NBA 2K21 made me walk my little character through the little town in which he lives to the virtual bank to cash a virtual check for virtual money he earned from an appearance on a virtual Sprite billboard that I needed to upgrade his jump shot. It’s TikTok videos blaring through someone else’s phone speakers. It’s having to pick four streetlights from nine images every time I try to use a Google Form. It’s Google searches that don’t offer links to the actual sites I want to visit until I scroll halway down the page. It’s like living with an overzealous college basketball referee that calls soft hand-checks and off-ball screens with 25 seconds left on the shot clock on every single possession.

This is one of the understated aspects of why I’ve turned so cynical about tech since about the beginning of the decade: It’s just annoying now. It’s turned everything so tedious, and now, vanishingly little of it even offers what I’d be willing to wade through the tedium to reach. I doubt the modern tech industry’s capacity to solve any problems anymore to begin with, but whatever problems it does solve will be too annoying to really use, locked behind a series of little interruptions and annoyances to begin with.

Not Vicks Sinex Moisturizing Saline Ultra Fine Nasal Spray, though. I put the nozzle into my nose, push down on the little lever, and the bottle sprays Vicks Sinex Moisturizing Saline Ultra Fine Nasal Spray into the scar tissue on my columella and up into my sinuses. Every time. No bullshit. Just saline. If I am to complain about the tedious state of so much of modernity, I ought to also celebrate that which is not: So, here’s to you, Vicks Sinex Moisturizing Saline Ultra Fine Nasal Spray! Thank you for doing what you are intended to do.