You know them. You’ve heard of the frustration they provoke in classrooms across the country and beyond. You’ve probably seen stands selling them on the street or at your local mall. You may even own a fidget spinner or five of your own. Chances are you associate these so-called toys with their widespread infamy: they’re the newest wave of irritating gadgets, rolling down the aisles of high school classrooms and clogging Facebook newsfeeds with videos of the newest tricks their owners have learned.

However, there’s something a little different here. Fidget spinners aren’t quite the same as the Tamagotchis and Silly Bandz that came before them. Here’s why.

As you probably know, these spinners were initially marketed as a tool to help aid restlessness induced by ADHD, anxiety, and other similar disorders. Though it’s been argued that no official studies have confirmed these benefits, there are many individuals who can attest to the ways in which these trinkets — and their relatives, including fidget cubes and spinner rings — have helped them calm down and improve their focus in learning environments.

Personally, I’m not really interested in the spinners, but I do have a fidget cube that I used during my last weeks of lectures at Mount Holyoke this spring, and it was little short of a godsend.

Anxiety is something that has defined my life in countless ways for as long as I can remember. One of its many consequences is restlessness: since preschool, I’ve had trouble keeping my hands still. I regularly pick my lips bloody, and before I cut my hair short, I would chew it, twist it, and pull it out by the handful. My fidget cube enables me to channel this restlessness in a harmless way: I can push buttons, turn discs, and flip switches without mauling my face or drawing unwanted attention to myself.

For some people, this is the miracle of fidget spinners. But many students thrilled by this sudden alleviation of the perpetual stress in the classroom environment have been able to enjoy it only briefly. The reason for this is simple, and honestly understandable: the spinners have become an annoyance, but not because of their original purpose. Rather than using them for stress relief and tactile stimulation, people of all ages have instead accepted them as a trendy toy, and toys have no place in the classroom, hence the widespread bans that have ensued. Thanks to the neurotypical appropriation of these tools, people with anxiety, attention deficit disorders, and other mental health troubles are unable to use them for their original purpose.

I’m far from the first person to point this out, but I want to highlight something that I haven’t seen mentioned before. This fidget spinner craze didn’t create itself. It’s one thing for people to become interested in the coolest new toy, but a trend isn’t a trend without the catalyst of mass marketability. And fidget spinners just happen to be perfect for this. They can be made of anything from plastic to solid gold, meaning that their cost is scalable, and they’re accessible by nearly any consumer class. They’re also compulsively collectable due to their wide range of colors, sizes, patterns, and materials. The result? People are buying more of them, more are being produced, more are available for purchase, and the cycle repeats. At their most basic level, they’re pieces of cheap junk, perfect for mass producing and selling by the boatload at curbside stalls. They’re guaranteed to rake in much more of a profit right now than the old standard merchandise of such sellers.

Consumers are the problem only to the extent that the system enables them to be. Fidget spinners are fun to collect; they’re an easy way to satiate our chronic compulsion to buy, to own, to show off. This compulsion, and our hyper-capitalist economy’s eagerness to indulge it, is the real issue here. With that constant goal of profit on the horizon, fidget spinners are produced and advertised in such quantities that you have to own at least one in order to stay on top of the latest status-dictating fad. And when that applies to a whole classroom of teenagers, the obvious next step in the minds of frustrated teachers is to ban them in schools, leaving kids with ADHD and other disorders right back where they started.

There’s no clear solution to this. Fidget spinners aren’t going to disappear in a hurry, though maybe those who actually optimize them for their intended purpose can take advantage of the less prominent cubes and rings in the meantime.
What we need to recognize is the symptomatic quality of this undesirable situation. The mass production of fidget spinners has more repercussions than I’ve even mentioned in this article -- mull on the word “landfills” for a bit. This trend is one more unsustainable cog in a machine blasting towards inevitable self-destruction.

You probably think I’m being dramatic, and I am. But consider the bloody lips, patchy scalps, and dropping grades of thousands upon thousands of mentally ill kids. Consider the towering heaps of plastic packed into the earth. Consider the millions of dollars put towards these so-called toys, and all the underfunded social, medical, and environmental organizations towards which that money could instead have been funneled.
Maybe a bit of intensity isn’t so unwarranted.