Videos of tech being destroyed will set you free, if only for a few minutes

This post is part of Hard Refresh, a soothing weekly column where we try to cleanse your brain of whatever terrible thing you just witnessed on Twitter.

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Depending on the day, technology can feel like the world’s biggest blessing  or curse.

At their best, laptops, phones, and tablets help people contact their loved ones, call into work meetings from home, and enjoy delightful content like the “thank u, next” music video. But connected devices also lead to the consumption of distressing news and hours wasted scrolling through social media. It’s a real love/hate relationship.

There’ve been countless times this year alone when I’ve wanted to straight up flush my phone down a toilet or catapult my laptop into a lake. I obviously can’t, because I have important things saved on them and tech is expensive as hell, so I began taking comfort in watching others destroy their devices instead.

People have been destroying tech for years as a way to attract YouTube views, inspire online rage, or just plain satisfy their own curiosity, but my newfound method of catharsis was inspired by a recent episode of Younger.

During a scene in season three’s episode, “The Marshmallow Experiment,” an Apple laptop (that belonged to a character’s dead ex-boyfriend) gets sent down a rolling conveyor belt slide and propelled into a swimming pool. It was a bold, confusing, and dramatic move, sure. But it was a beautiful one, and watching it made me feel alive.

Look at that baby go! Seeing a laptop that looks identical to my own get submerged in water, open up, emit some bubbles, and gently sink down to its death gave me secondhand serenity.

I mean, who among us hasn’t, at one point, wished they could send their laptop to a similar watery grave?

I do not recommend destroying your own by any means, but what’s the harm in living vicariously through other people destroying theirs? No existential crisis or bag of rice required.

Once Younger gave me a taste of of tech destruction, I was hooked. I began looking into the wonderfully edgy (but undeniably wasteful) world of annihilating tech, and let me tell you, it is expansive.

There’s videos of all kinds of tech deaths — people setting laptops on fire, smashing them with sledge hammers, running them over with cars, and throwing them out windows. And if iPhone demolition is your thing, people have been chucking the mobile devices into buckets of water, blenders, microwaves, toothpaste, slime, and even lava for over a decade.

You have a wide library of tech demise videos available to you on the very same devices you hate so much. So you can enjoy a little bit of everything or identify your most satisfying takedown tool, search for it, and binge away.

As tech companies work to make their devices indestructible, future phone and laptop screens may become harder to crack and more water-resistant. But it seems those improvements will be no match for GizmoSlip.

The YouTube channel with more than three million subscribers takes tech durability testing to the next level, performing next level drop tests, setting bear traps to crush devices, and more awe-inspiring stunts. GizmoSlip host Brandon Baldwin encases devices in everything from watermelons and blocks of ice, to Flarp putty and giant sushi rolls. He drops bowling balls, shatters screens with yo-yos, and even covers devices in massive Jolly Ranchers.

It’s hilarious and thrilling, and sometimes, when tech and the online world do you wrong, it’s exactly the kind of content you need to watch to refresh and rekindle your relationship with your screens.