Sacred Clicks: From Relics to Fidget Cubes (Classen and The Deepest Sense)

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 Sacred Clicks: From Relics to Fidget Cubes (Classen and The Deepest Sense)

By Calliope Mills

Picture this: You’re in a meeting, your camera off, half-listening while absentmindedly clicking a fidget cube or spinning a little gadget in your hand. It’s become so common that it barely raises an eyebrow anymore. But why do so many of us reach for fidget toys in moments of stillness or stress? 

To understand the rise of fidget toys, we need to zoom out to the bigger picture—one that cultural historian Constance Classen lays out in The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch. Among a variety of other topics, Classen explores how the modern world has reshaped our relationship with touch, often limiting and regulating it. Fidget toys, in this light, are more than distractions. They’re symptoms of a tactile hunger in a visually saturated, touch-deprived society.

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    As Classen describes throughout her work, touch has been increasingly managed and controlled in modernity “Eighteenth-century etiquette shows that the use of touch was increasingly restricted….Children like to touch clothes and other things that please them with their hands. This urge must be corrected, and they must be taught to touch all they see only with their eyes” (Classan 155). Although in the past tactile elements—from religious relics to public embraces—were encouraged, modern society has become more individualistic, emphasizing boundaries and distancing physical contact. Hygiene campaigns, professional norms, and technological tools reduced spontaneous touch and emphasized visual and auditory engagement instead.

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Touch, as Classen also notes, had deep religious significance in earlier centuries. Handling sacred objects, participating in tactile rituals, and physically engaging with relics were all ways that believers connected with the divine. The sense of touch was not just physical but spiritual. As modernity progressed, however, these tactile religious practices were often replaced by more distant, visually oriented forms of worship, as churches shifted focus from embodied rituals to sermons and scripture reading, “By replacing tactile proximity with visual distance the Church sought to put an end to such rough handling” (Classen 150). This naturally contributed to the general decrease of touch in everyday life, leaving behind a void that some might argue persists today.

Enter fidget toys: small, personal objects that allow for private tactile engagement. They're touchable tools in a world that often tells us to keep our hands to ourselves. The variety of clicking, spinning, squeezing provides a kind of tactile relief from the modern lack of casual touch,  offering a way to feel without breaching these new rules of personal space.

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This is seen outside of religion as well, as domestic and institutional environments helped shape tactile behavior. Homes, schools, and workplaces were designed to discipline the body, limiting movement and reducing spontaneous contact. In schools, for instance, students were expected to sit still and keep their hands to themselves. The body was trained to be quiet. “Public schooling was intended to provide a moral and physical training more than a cultivation of the intellect” (Classen 171).

Fidget toys emerge in this context not just as tools for fun, but as coping mechanisms. Especially for neurodivergent individuals or those managing anxiety and attention disorders, fidget toys offer a controlled outlet for movement and touch in settings where such behaviors are often discouraged.

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Although I never bought into the fidget spinner trend, I rarely find myself in class without some stationary object to move around and fiddle with. 

    I feel as though the popularity of fidget toys might point to something larger. In an era consumed by screens and distance, where most of our interactions happen through swipes and taps, these tactile tools offer something refreshing. They give us a chance to engage with the physical world, however minimally.

Maybe fidget toys are a kind of tactile counterculture—a quiet rebellion against the immateriality of modern life. They remind us that we are still bodies, still beings that crave sensation, even if we often forget it. As Classen might argue, our deepest sense is not lost, but it is certainly in flux. Fidget toys may not restore touch to its central cultural place, but they do keep it alive—click by click, spin by spin.




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