“Oddly Satisfying”: 40 Times People Were Unexpectedly Pleasantly Surprised By What They Saw
From funny cat memes to honest parenting tweets, some genres of content have taken over our social media feeds and cemented themselves as the cornerstones of the internet.
This article is about one of them. 'Oddly satisfying' is an online term born out of people's attempts to describe the inexplicably pleasing sensation that we experience while seeing some mundane thing. Like a carefully swirled bookstack, or rainbow foam leaking from a broken car wash. You get the idea.
So we at Bored Panda decided to pay our respects to this cult classic, and what better way to do it than to feature a Twitter account that's named directly after it!
More info: Twitter
This post may include affiliate links.
Hard answers that explain our fascination with the oddly satisfying may be lacking, but one possibility is that it taps into our subconscious urge toward what psychologists call the "just right" feeling.
It's the sensation that arises when we've put things in order and serves as a useful cut-off point for simple tasks. It's also what often goes wrong in individuals with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)—for reasons not fully understood, some people with OCD don't interpret the sensory cues that indicate the job is done, leaving them searching fruitlessly for a sense of completion. The quest for finality often leads to things like continually rearranging objects and repeatedly checking doors to see if they are locked.
In fact, OCD was the first thing that came to Sarah Keedy's mind when the director of the Cognition-Emotion Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Chicago first viewed an oddly satisfying compilation.
"It was nothing I sat around and thought about, it hit me right away," Keedy said. "It was truly an overwhelming sense of this is a series of visual depictions of things that struck me as rewarding experiences that … [people with OCD] tend to be going for to a pathological degree."
Had a friend in High School whose handwriting looked like a typewriter. Didn't believed he had written it until I asked him to write me something.
These are so beautiful... walking on this surface would be amazing. Well, not so much if it cracked or broke, but still...
Nuts and bolts that fit snugly together appear to satisfy an existential longing.
In a world of chaos and inelegance, it can be reassuring to see order. If anything, this content reveals that people with OCD aren't anomalous in their desire to bring a pleasing equilibrium to their lives after all.
The oddly satisfying sweet spot was famously examined by researchers from Spain. They gave people with OCD and a control group a word recall task and cut them off in the middle of completing it.
They theorized that a task involving ordering and checking something (in this case, words) would activate their internal "just right" sensors. Stopping them before finishing would then trigger unease.
I am ridiculously pleased with myself because I realised what it was before I saw the title.
Incredible how recognizable it was. Saw it as the preview picture, so without caption, but I immediately recognized it.
almost completely close your eyes and you will see the link Capture-64...181869.jpg 
If that were more than 10 feet away, that's how I'd see the original.
Ooooh its just like Magic Eye! I didn't see it until I slowly moved the phone away from my face
If you squint and then slowly close your eyes and then imagine the American gothic then it looks just like it
I just spent ten minutes squinting and blurring my eyes in different positions XD
I see it way clearer without my glasses and I'm legally blind...huh...how bout that?
Load More Replies...
Was just scrolling by until I caught one of the comments. Freaky when I went back and looked again. It looked so random at first glance.
I love this! And I knew what it was the moment I saw it, probably because it looks like the world when I don't have my glasses on.
it is jsut like the thnig that if the frist and the lsat ltetr are croerct, you can raed the stctenene
Interesting to walk back and look from a distance. More details are discernible. Weird.
Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, Mary Cassat, Winslow Homer, Gilbert Stuart, Norman Rockwell? ...or if you're so inclined, at the other end of the art spectrum there's Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichenstein, Jean Michel Basquait, Jeff Koons, Robert Motherwell, Georgia O'Keefe. Nevermind all of the unknowns that had famous art as part of the Federal Art Project during the depression. If you can't find American art that you like, you're not even looking.
Load More Replies...
It's the Great Parterre at Schönbrunn Palace in Wien. It's part of an Italian style Garden planted in mid-XVIII century for Empress Maria Theresa. The trees have been trimmed yearly since then, they are meant to have perfectly square topiary shapes in spring. The trim is made with a traditional method, cut by hand using a wooden scaffold pulled by horses, only recently replaced by an electric tractor. schnbrunn-...ce38b6.jpg 
The hypothesis was right. People in the control group felt uncomfortable when something was left undone, and for the OCD participants, it was even worse (two of them even mailed completed lists to the researchers afterward to satisfy their urge for finality).
background of the background.... it's an optical illusion... sure it's cool but.... Mind-blowing?
The researchers' findings are hardly groundbreaking; of course, we do not like to leave tasks unfinished.
But extrapolating this idea to the oddly satisfying images, it's quite clear why seeing a plant perfectly peeling away from a building gives us so much satisfaction!
this guy is more than talented : https://www.odeith.com/ (the before/after !!)
I actually saw Mt. Rainier in person once! It’s gorgeous
It's a common "cool project" for introductory wood spinning courses. It's perfect to learn proper gluing techniques, centering, positioning and repositioning on the mandrel, basic curve shaping, working on uneven materials and surface finishing. Unfortunately this one is quite bad at everything, the gluing is shoddy (hexagons not matching, large holes and glue drops showing), the shape is uneven, there are burn mark from improper workmanship and the finish is lacking.
It's great until you want to get a book out and can't without ruining a large part of it.
Being an inert and natural material, with glass there are no chemicals that can leach into the liquid and affect the coke's flavour. That's why drinking out of a bottle may be the best way to get the purest Coca-Cola flavor, But the reason I have heard most {I have been told by the workers at a lil Mexican shop near my house that is the only place in 50 miles that sells it} Some say that Mexican Coke tastes more “natural” than American Coke because American-made Coke switched to using high fructose corn syrup as a sweetening agent in 1980. Mexican Coke continued using cane sugar to sweeten its version
Note: this post originally had 45 images. It’s been shortened to the top 40 images based on user votes.
It’s interesting how many of these pictures called up the memory other senses in my head — the smell of crayons, the sounds of plastic unwrapping and popping, the crunch of perfectly groomed snow. It’s like my brain is so fond of these orderly experiences that just the picture is enough to revive the deepest sensory parts of my memory.
This article is such a disservice to people who suffer OCD. This is from Mayo Clinic and sheds some light on what OCD actually looks like. Please read more on the disease to realize how severe and debilitating it can be. MAYO CLINIC: OCD obsessions are repeated, persistent and unwanted thoughts, urges or images that are intrusive and cause distress or anxiety. You might try to ignore them or get rid of them by performing a compulsive behavior or ritual. These obsessions typically intrude when you're trying to think of or do other things. Obsessions often have themes to them, such as: Fear of contamination or dirt Doubting and having difficulty tolerating uncertainty Needing things orderly and symmetrical Aggressive or horrific thoughts about losing control and harming yourself or others Unwanted thoughts, including aggression, or sexual or religious subjects
It’s interesting how many of these pictures called up the memory other senses in my head — the smell of crayons, the sounds of plastic unwrapping and popping, the crunch of perfectly groomed snow. It’s like my brain is so fond of these orderly experiences that just the picture is enough to revive the deepest sensory parts of my memory.
This article is such a disservice to people who suffer OCD. This is from Mayo Clinic and sheds some light on what OCD actually looks like. Please read more on the disease to realize how severe and debilitating it can be. MAYO CLINIC: OCD obsessions are repeated, persistent and unwanted thoughts, urges or images that are intrusive and cause distress or anxiety. You might try to ignore them or get rid of them by performing a compulsive behavior or ritual. These obsessions typically intrude when you're trying to think of or do other things. Obsessions often have themes to them, such as: Fear of contamination or dirt Doubting and having difficulty tolerating uncertainty Needing things orderly and symmetrical Aggressive or horrific thoughts about losing control and harming yourself or others Unwanted thoughts, including aggression, or sexual or religious subjects
