By the time I reached Lima and asked what she thought was the key to her success (I still don’t know — she stopped returning my email), I had trolled the spectrum of toy unboxings and found what felt like an interesting clue: Unequivocally, the most popular toy unboxings featured totally insignificant junk. The DisneyCollector video mentioned earlier, the one watched more than 90 million times, is nothing more than the slow denuding of six surprise eggs, the sticker price of $1.99 still visible on one of the plastic shells.

Fascinatingly, surprise eggs — oblong plastic casings holding tiny trinkets usually destined for the garbage — are the powerhouse plaything in children-oriented unboxings, the videos that seem to really go viral. Searching “surprise egg unboxing” feels like pressing an elevator button and seeing the doors open to a vast alternate universe beyond. There are many dedicated, egg-only channels, which often string their clips together into long-run medleys — compilations of small yet unrelenting climaxes, like listening to a mix comprising only song hooks.

It occurred to me that perhaps the appeal of an unboxing video has no practical relationship to consumerism, that its satisfactions are more mysteriously folded into our emotional response system. Take, for example, the popular Tumblr blog Things Fitting Perfectly Into Other Things, where photos are collected of random objects that, as the site’s title suggests, fit perfectly into each other: a pill into the hole at the end of a wooden ruler; a Ritz cracker into the base of a paper cup. Some of these pictures get hundreds of likes and reblogs, many of the comments reading something like this one, in response to a picture of two plastic bins nesting snugly in a brown cardboard box: “I cried because this blog made me feel so good/I am so satisfied right now/What is this wizardry.” (Tumblr users are known for their rather effusive house style. But still.)

YouTube in particular seems to have the ability to turn formerly unnamed, truly private little pleasures — the most insignificant of dopamine triggers — into rich, multichanneled cultures. Search “clean corn shuck,” and you will be surprisingly rewarded. If you search — and I honestly do not suggest anyone do this — “popping zits,” you will find that not only are there a giant number of pimple-popping channels, but there is also an emergent vocabulary, both in terms of how these videos are shot and how they are described. There is the “mirror blast” and the “squirting cyst geyser,” and there is a surprising level of interest in the age of blackheads.

Even though the people unboxing on camera might have motivations for doing it that look sensible on paper, our reasons for watching these videos seem to come from a more snake-brained place. There is an undeniable pleasure in opening a fresh, new item, even something as small as a pencil eraser, in the same way there is a base, possibly universal, pleasure in getting the very last drops out of a shampoo bottle or in removing the peel off an orange in one go. Somewhat frustrating for the theory stringer — or the mother with the digital-native toddler — the root of these videos’ gargantuan success could lie solely in the fact that it feels good to take the plastic off something unused.

One night, I went down an unboxing spiral of diminishing price points, first voluntarily and then on some kind of gimme-more autopilot. I began with unboxings of $12,000 Hermès Birkin bags and then moved on to MacBook Airs, Louboutin pumps, Bang & Olufsen headphones, Nike sneakers, $20 Havaianas flip flops and all the way down to a man in his bedroom who made a video called “Unboxing My New Hanes Briefs 7-Pack Style 2252P7 in HD.” Never has HD been less necessary. “I bought them at Walmart for $9.95,” the man says, showing how, in the plastic package, the undies are divided into one bunch of three and one bunch of four. “They weren’t on sale. . . . Now I will just take the tape off. . . .”

My search ended with a $2 Bic pen unboxing, a nearly silent video of a man’s trembling hands taking the pen out of its packaging and showing that, yes, it does work on plain white paper. By then I’d been online for hours. I felt emptied and stoned, having viewed too many hands with no faces. But I still watched the man try out his little plastic pen with interest, and I’ll admit that I did think, Oh, I love that feeling of a fresh new ballpoint, when you get it on the paper and the ink flows for the first time.