When you’ve known someone long enough, come to understand the intricate shades and contours of their being, you can sometimes arrive at sublime, quiet moments where words just feel like they get in the way. We’ve been sharing viral online content with you for years now, and your clicks of that content have come to feel as natural to us as the tidal rhythm of our breath. The countless GIFs we’ve enjoyed together, the quizzes through which you’ve bared to us deep, sacred truths, they’ve cultivated that rarest bond between reader and website where simply existing in one another’s presence is enough. So it’s a testament to that closeness that here, now, as we share with you this list of 12 totally game-changing kitchen hacks, we don’t feel the need to say any particular captions about them at all.

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Sure, we could put an explanatory caption here to tell you how you can effortlessly bring your cast iron skillet’s seasoning to a whole new level, but simply basking in the quiet tranquility of a captionless image with you feels just as rewarding—perhaps even more so. It’s nice to just share a peaceful moment together now and then, and wordy descriptions of how these kitchen hacks specifically work can wait until another day. For right now, let’s just savor this chance to set our usual captions aside for a minute and speak, if you will, through the silence instead.

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Mmm. It’s nice to be able to just let a kitchen hack hang in the air like this. No explanation necessary.

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Back in 2014 or 2015, when we were still only getting to know you, we’d have felt too uncomfortable to offer up this kitchen hack without a long, rambling caption about how to gauge the freshness of eggs. But now? We feel completely at ease just trusting implicitly that you’ll get it and go wild for it, no caption necessary.

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Amazing, isn’t it? The abundance that can be found in silence, the almost sacred communion of two browsers—yours and ours—wordlessly contemplating content. No noise but for the glad song of a jay nesting outside the window.  

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Sometimes we’ll see the captions on a Buzzfeed or Lifehacker listicle and feel this tremendous sense of sadness for them. How stilted and formal they feel they have to be around their readership, how they feel such a constant need to explain themselves. 

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But here? The world outside this list falls away. There are no worries about search engine optimization, no pressure to hit pageview quotas for our advertisers. There is only us, these 12 clever and convenient kitchen hacks, and you, encompassing the totality of all being. To simply show you this kitchen hack in the tender hush of a caption unspoken is to know that it’s about to step up your kitchen game in a big way.

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God, this is what it’s all about. This oneness. This pristine silence, unspoiled by the superfluous clamor of captions elaborating on the kitchen hacks. Just listen to it:

 

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And that makes 12. Wow, this was really special. We wish this list could go on forever, but of course these kitchen hacks will continue to bind us long after you’ve closed this browser tab, lingering in the quiet between every exhalation, as if we’re connected via some primal LinkedIn of the soul. So get out there, try a couple of these helpful culinary tricks yourself, and know that the hallowed bond we share will endure for as long as there is viral content to go wild over.