Objects of Love

We live in a world of objects to which we assign varying degrees of worth, from old newspapers to treasured action figures, family heirlooms and golden idols. What's it all about? Where does this object attachment come from? Tune in to learn more in this classic episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey guys, welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. This is Julie Douglas talking at you today.
Today's episode Objects of Love is an Encore presentation that
we're rolling out and dusting off, mainly because we just
laid out about five or so Valentine themed episodes, an

(00:26):
attempt to take love and lust down to the studs
for examination. So as a sort of palate cleanser, we
thought we'd offer up this episode on the stuff we
love and the reasons why we cling to it. So,
but don't worry, we are not going to take away
your woobi a K. You're blankie, So enough preamble. We

(00:46):
hope that you enjoy today's episode. Julie, do you have
any magical objects with you today? Any good luck charms,
any personal items of importance? I was thinking about this.
I'm not really into the sort of magical thinking lucky items.
I have to say. Yeah, yeah, called up your hands.

(01:08):
Do you have any rings on? Oh? You don't have
any rings on? Nothing? Nothing? Huh okay, Yeah, I mean
maybe I have my lucky underwear on. Maybe I don't
you I mean not underwear. No, well, I mean nothing.
Let's see what do I have? I mean right now,
I just I have my wedding ring, and I do

(01:28):
there's so there's a certain amount of magical thinking involved
in that. Do I have any No, I don't have
any aiments on me right now, but I in the past,
I've I've certainly fallen in the habit of using them.
I think I've talked about this before. I previously had
a Ganitia remover of obstacles, remover of obstacles, the Hindu
god that the is that has a the you know,

(01:51):
the elephant appearance, and I have featured on The Simpsons
in a hilarious episode. Yes, yes, also also made fun
of there. But I carried around because you know, remover
of obstacles and you know this various ties into ties
into creativity and all. And so I would carry that
in my pocket. And then eventually I lost it, like
it crawled out in the washing machine or something and

(02:11):
left me. And and so I've always felt I felt
kind of bad. I'm like, where did Ganesha go? Did
Ganesha abandon me? And then and then I found Ganesha
put him back in and then and then he disappeared
again and hasn't come back, and and also in the
past all occasionally like pick up a rock, Like if
I'm at the beach and I'm having a particularly good day,

(02:32):
I'll pick up that rock and take it with me,
and That'll end up in my pocket for maybe a
year or so, um, you know, because that kind of
comes to symbolize like a nice memory, and so I
can take it out and I can sort of I
think back to that time. So what I'm hearing is
that you have various kinds of boobies. Yeah, security blankets.

(02:53):
Oh yes, yeah, I guess they are to a certain
extent security blanket. I mean they're not you know, apples
to apples, but there is the sort of warm and
fuzzy thing that you're trying to evoke with with an object,
right Yah. Yeah, I mean it's uh, I mean it's
weird for me because like when I'm if I'm holding
a ganitia, I don't actually think that I'm using this

(03:13):
as a totem to get in touch with some sort
of a god, you know, like it's not like a
literal interpretation of the amulet. But there is a certain
amount of positive thinking that that comes with having it.
And I've also wondered a lot of times when I'm
passing by my own desk or coworkers desks, or seeing
somebody's desk on on TV where they have action figures,

(03:35):
typically like a dude's desk, you know, have various action figures,
and I wondered, what extent are modern action figures? Kind
of akin to the amulets of old, you know, like
today we don't have a papion of God's to really
call upon for the most part, but instead we have
all these various pop culture icons and cartoon characters that
represent various things, at least on a subconscious level, and

(03:58):
we keep them around to draw strength from them. You
haven't found the Pantheon room, that just w Pantheon room. No,
do we have one? Oh my goodness, but to the
room with the black toilet and the black sink. Yeah, yeah,
the superhero bathroom. Okay, well, see I've been missing that.
But if you if you passed by my desk, you
passed by like Jonathan's Strickland's desk, you passed by is
the office, you'll see little little figures, you know. So

(04:20):
I wondered what I mean. Obviously, they're on our death,
they're in our workspace, there in our work environment, informing
you know, our our relationship with our with our work,
with with what we're trying to do with and and
representing a little bit of who we are. So to
what extent are those becoming deities? I don't know? Well, okay,
so that's what we're going to try to get to
the bottom of today. We're gonna look at objects, our

(04:42):
relationship to objects, and we're going to try to figure
out how much of this has to do with our
own uh ability to acquire things, and whether or not
this acquisitiveness is natural to us. And then we're gonna
look a little bit at a compulsupporting too. When you
comes some materialism, it is really a distinctive human trait

(05:03):
for the most part, especially when you look at its
more outrageous examples. The one that I was really partial
to was the one I brought up by Steve Taylor
and his article The Madness of Materialism, which just a great, short,
little article, but he he mentions gold, especially the like
European colonists love of gold and UH and their clashes

(05:25):
with with the native people's in the America's UH There's
one example that he brings up where an Indian chief
in Cuba learned that the Spanish sailors were about to
tack his land, so he actually praised to the spirit
of the gold to for for a like they've become.
They're trying to figure out why of these one of
these these people so into gold, this this shiny rock
from the ground. They must have some sort of They

(05:47):
must believe it's a god. They must believe that it
is that has supernatural powers, because otherwise, why would you
go to such ridiculous ends, Why would you wage all
this bloodshed just to get it right? Because otherwise it's like, well,
you guys are just talking like ferret. It's going after
something shiny. So surely this piece of gold has something
to it, and he prayed to it right and it
didn't work. Didn't work because, as as he points out

(06:10):
in this article, Steve Tailor points up, a certain amount
of hoarding of resources makes evolutionary sense. You know, we've
talked before and in the while, there are certain things
that are scarce. I mean, food itself is going to
be scarce to varying degrees, and so to whatever degree
we can plan ahead that we can stockpile it, the
better off will be if that means bearing nuts in

(06:31):
the yard, if that means uh, you know, finding something
that is that is more rare in nature, like sugar
and being able to store that away like like all
that makes sense firewood. I mean, there are things that
are they're part of our survival that that that makes
sense when we're hoarding it. Well, it makes sense I
think to a culture that is settled. But if you
look at back at early man um in particularly the

(06:54):
fact that early Man was a nomadic species um then
you know that a hoarding or stockpiling just really wasn't convenient,
That's right. I mean, yeah, if you're always on the
mood move if you even if you have kind of
like cyclical uh patterns to your your movement and you know,
going from north to south depending on what the weather

(07:14):
is doing, Yeah, you're not gonna be able to carry
all of this with you. You can maybe stockpile some
of it, but you're not going to carry it all
on your back. Yeah. So there's this big question mark
like is this really genetic? Is this something that's natural
to humans, this impulse to buy and possess things, or
is it something that really is more symptomatic of modern man,
particularly from the nineteenth century on, right, when things became

(07:38):
much easier to produce, to produce cheaply, and then to
acquire cheaply. Yeah, And I mean when it comes to
stockpiling things that are important. I mean, when once we
get out of this, uh, this transitory nature of culture
and we get into into actually settling in areas and
growing food. I mean, being able to stockpile food. I
mean that's part and partial to a lot of our

(08:00):
cultural growth as as a as a species, our ability
to put food away, have more food than we need,
and then specialize our roles within a community. But what
about just buying lots of plastic things, right and putting
them in a storage unit and then that storage and
it being auctioned off in a show called Storage Wars
or something like that, right, Yeah, Because yeah, then it
seems like we're definitely getting into pathological area. We're getting

(08:23):
into an area where it is just it is a sickness.
It is some natural instinct that has been perverted. Because
even even though the you know, the native peoples of
the Americas couldn't understand the less for gold. If you
put gold within the context of of wealth, and then
wealth equals power, wealth equals comfort, wealth equals food. Then
I can see the cognitive steps you know, necessary to

(08:44):
think I gotta have all the gold, right because I
have to possess the symbol of it, which is probably
a large part of why we do have this such
such a high degree of acquisitiveness, right, like wanting to
get acquire everything. Um. But you know, the question is
is it genetic? Well was a study by Justine Giddon's,
Julie Shermer and Philip Vernon from the University of Western Ontario,

(09:06):
and they wanted to know how much of it was environmental,
how much of it which genetics. Of course, they turned
to the twins. They recruited two hundred and forty pairs
of twins identical and fraternal, and they looked at the
benchmark of individual differences um, personality, values, happiness, and we
know about forty percent of those traits are heritable. Right.

(09:29):
So to the surprise of these researchers, they found that
individual differences in materialism were almost entirely attributed to environmental
factors and not a genetic thing going on here. So
that kind of makes sense. Right, And that actually makes
sense to me in the context of hoarding, because, yes,
hoarding does have some pathological brain disorder elements to it,

(09:52):
but a lot of the triggers for hoarding our environmental. So, um,
you know, if you had a loved one who recently
passed away or something that was life changing, that kind
of sort of flipped the switch and hoarding behavior. And
when I talk about hoarding behavior, I'm talking about an
excessive collection of objects. This is like one of those
things where it's like I must keep every newspaper that

(10:13):
has ever come out. And it's not just keep them,
but like if you were to be separated from those newspapers,
you would suffer, you would feel pain, you would you
would be confused, you'd have an inability to really make
clearheaded decisions about the sort of stuff in your life. Yeah,
and you've seen one of these shows. To me, that's
enough recording shows, because it can be a bit much
to take in that it can be. I mean, they're

(10:33):
they're kind of depressing, uh, But but I think I
saw one once where it was like food items and
it wasn't in a sense that like I need to
save all the sweet potatoes because I love sweet potatoes
and I need need to eat these sweet podata is later.
But it would be like, oh, the sweet potato looked
really good. This is a really cool looking sweet potata,
and like this weird emotional attachment to the sweet potato,
and then it must be kept even though it's rotting

(10:54):
in the refrigerator. Yeah. Well, it turns out that people
who have hoarding behavior or hoarding disorder, they actually have
a part of their brain. Um, this is an interior
singular cortex. This part of their brain is actually not
behaving the same way as quote unquote normal people because
that is the part of the brain that's actually governing

(11:16):
your decisions and re um some some impulse control yeah, um,
but primarily it's the decision making. And so if you
take people who have the hoarding disorder and you look
at them in m r I scans when they are
considering whether or not to part from an object that
they own, you'll see that You'll see the fuzzy nature
going on there, So you know that it is, um,

(11:37):
it is a brain disorder. It is this this part
of their brain that is saying, I just don't know
what to do here, and so it's not just like Okay,
I need to have everything in the world, or some
sort of gluttonous you know, void that they're trying to fill.
It really is coming from the decisions that their their
brain circuitry is making. And Um, this is I thought

(12:00):
this was really interesting when I found out about it. Um,
hoarding behavior actually has some connection, or a lot of
connection to narcissism. So you think about narcissism, and you
think about vanity, you think about narcissus, do you think
about the reflection in the pool captivated by one's appearance.
But it really is sort of a coping mechanism, and

(12:20):
I believe it was Dr Rebecca Beaten. She explained this
to me a couple of years ago when I interviewed
her um about hoarding. She told me that kids who
are feeling abandoned from their parents, or they don't have
a significant relationship with a parent or really any sort
of guardian in other words, they they're not getting that
emotional connection or even sort of the touch of the

(12:41):
hug or any of that, they begin to turn inward
and they began to become narcissists because they have to
find self comfort from themselves and some of that gets
attributed to objects, so then they began to collect objects.
Is this part of comfort? And that's where you see
the behavior played out. And of course this brings to
mind and the Peanuts character Linus and it's blanket, right,

(13:04):
his wooby, his his comfort blanket, his uh or if
you want to get into the more technical, his comfort object,
his transitional object, which is something you see with a
lot of a lot of kids. I mean it's uh,
let's see, did I have now my now, my sister
definitely had a blanket called blank e and uh. And
it got to the point where they ended up like
cutting off the edge of Blanky so that she could

(13:26):
continue to carry blankly around with her. And I think
she may still have I think she still keeps blankly around. Well,
you know, my daughter's four, and the same thing has
happened to her blanket. She calls it Blanky's blanky. Wait, now,
the part that came off she carries around is called
blank's blanky. So it's the blank like the shard of blanket.
It's all right, it's like a like it's kind of

(13:47):
like a religious artifact kind of. And she hides it
in her bed and she's really freaky about it, like
we can't find it. It's like blank is blanket? Well,
I mean to an uninformed observer, it could in a
little freaky because it's like, because it is kind of
borderline religious obsession, it may seem like. In fact, if
you go back to the nineteen forties, attachment to a

(14:07):
special object by a child was regarded as just pathological
behavior and it's just a case of childhood fetish reflecting
something askew in the mother child relationship. Yeah, it must
be doing something wrong because your kid has this gross
scrap of a blanket that they're carrying around. And I
think it's interesting that they look at it as a fetish,
particularly if you kind of take a wide angle view

(14:28):
of that period anyway, where you see a lot of
this idea as of fetish or fetishism coming out. Um.
But yeah, it wasn't until the fifties right when they
started to say, you know what, this is actually a
normal thing. It's a good thing. Yeah. Yeah, people like DW.
Wincott started defining these as normal and necessary and as
a transitional experience. A key step in an infantsi ability

(14:48):
to distinguish this inner subjective world from the outside reality.
So you know, through the even through the seventies and eighties,
there was still this sort of people are still clinging
to this old notion that it's there's something wrong that
the kid has some you know, some anxiety problems or something,
and that's why they're holding onto it. But but really,
the the the academic understanding of it was was pretty
much in place, yeah, because it began to understand that

(15:10):
this could really help allay some of the fears, um
some of the anxieties that children have. Of course they
haven't because remember they have an entirely new view of life,
so they have to categorize every loud sound, every image
and try to make sense of it. Is it a threat?
Is it not a threat? And so this transitional object

(15:30):
really does help because it is sort of like the
stand in for, you know, a parental unit or something else.
There's a study by G. J. Bara, R. H. Passman,
and C. Eisenberg, and they found that during a routine
third year pediatric examination, the security object enhanced rapport with
the examining nurse, and then children attached to a blanket
who were allowed access to it were rated as less

(15:52):
distressed and they experienced less physiological stress um and that
is evidenced by the heart rate and the systolic blood press. Sure,
so this is in contrast to kids who are undergoing
medical evaluate evaluation without their woobies. Really yeah, and certainly
these woobies, um, as you said that they can end
up becoming like an important parenting tool, I understand as well.

(16:12):
I mean, if you're, if you're, you use it wisely, right,
I mean it's I guess it's powerful stuff to play with,
But I was reading about how you know a parent
can can use it to their advantage, and a kid
needs the movie too to remain comfortable in a position
when the mother is away. I think it's really important
to um, like around age one and so on and
so forth, when when they start to feel the separation anxiety,

(16:34):
as you say, like leaving the house or even just
sleeping at night, I think having something to grab onto
is really important. One of the interesting things about studying
transitional objects is that is that there's ultimately a kind
of a lack of uniformity in the definition of it
and also the cultural significance of it. Like some of
the cultural stats are pretty interesting, like um, the United

(16:55):
the States sixty of children have at least a mild
degree of attachment to some sort of soft and animal object.
And I think, looking back, I did have I had
a stuffed rhinoceros named RINCHI that I would had an
attachment to um. But but I don't know. Then you're
getting into like stuffed animals. You're getting into a whole
different area because those have personality. I don't know. Does

(17:15):
Blankie or does Blankie's Blankie have a personality? Do you think, well,
sometimes Blanky's Blankie gets in trouble or does things like
takes all the toilet paper off the toilet roll or
something like that. But um, generally, I think that's just
general scoundrelness right now. Well, okay, so anyway, six children
in the US have some sort of mild degree exhibit

(17:35):
strong attachment. But then if you look at incidences of
attachment in the Netherlands and New Zealand and Sweden, that's
that's comparable to the United States. Korean children have substantially
fewer attachments to blankets down to eight uh that compared
to American children, but in Korean born children living in
the United States to play an intermediate percentage of thirty

(17:57):
four five percent of rural Italian children have transitional objects
compared tot of urban Italians, and it goes as far
as the sixty two of foreign children living in Rome.
So don't you just see the stats I guess kind
of skewing towards urban areas. Yeahs say, that's interesting to
see that it can be. You know, within one country

(18:18):
you could have such a so many different variables there
and oh but in London, just six of children have
a special security object in there. That's London, So there
goes the urban argument. So it's just it's it's hard
to find the exactly what's going on. There's just so
many cultural factors to look at the I guess well,
and you have to wonder too if if part of
that is just to say, like, that's not as accepted

(18:40):
and therefore maybe in that culture it's not as encouraged,
or it's not maybe as prominent, people don't see it
as much, yeah, or maybe there's less of a culture
of these are my objects and these are your objects,
and it's more these are our objects. You know. Some
of this had to do with memory to write, like
they would go back and say, oh, did I have
an object that I was connected to, and so they're

(19:01):
collecting some of this data from faulty memory where people
are saying yes or no and they couldn't exactly remember.
I also want to point out too that you know,
transitional object is very different from a pacifier, And of
course a pacifier is something that's used to self soothe
and babies, but I kind of think of it as
gum for babies. You know, it's an activity to to

(19:22):
try to help them with their eventual um eating skills, uh,
they're swallowing skills, and it kind of helps keep them
occupied if they're hungry and you're trying to prepare a
bottle or something like that. But it is very different
in terms of comfort. All Right, we're gonna take a
quick break, Okay, so we're back, yeah, and we're going

(19:54):
to get into the realm of magical thinking. This is
charactery that we've we've moved through many times before that it
it continues to be important because it really does deal
with how we think about the world and versus how
the world really is. I mean we Magical thinking, of course,
is the belief that an object, action, or circumstance not
logically related to a course of events can influence its outcome.

(20:17):
So in magical thinking, you get into all these ideas
of of everything from a haunted house, the idea that, oh,
something bad happened here, so now something is bad with
the house, you know, like the idea that that that
that an event can affect the physical object, or even
like mere mementos. I mean I've mentioned my father's watch before,

(20:38):
you know, like obviously that's that's something that has significance
to me. And there's a certain amount of magical thinking
involved there. Um, you know, even if it's at a
subconscious level, even if I'm not thinking, oh this this
has the spirit of my dad, and I think, oh
that's that is that was his watch, and there is
some sense of him about it. So magical thinking kind
of uh, you know, is intertwined in all our lives, uh,

(21:01):
to varying degrees, and you know, be a conscious or subconscious.
One of the more more conscious ways, of course, is
with the idea of a lucky charm. Yeah. And uh,
there's something called apophenia, and that is seeing patterns where
there are none, and that is a little bit of
the suit based two magical thinking, right, because again, if
you let's say you're wearing something and something great happens,

(21:23):
you think, oh, those are those lucky socks. I must
wear them every time that I have to do this
certain challenge, and began to to make this causal connection.
But then there's always that difference between oh, I've got
a big interview, I'm gonna wear those lucky socks of mine.
There's that, and then there's these are my lucky socks.
I must wear them every day, and they must never
be washed, or they must be washed exactly eight times

(21:45):
to contain their their magic, you know. I mean there's
a line between the sort of helpful magical thinking and
UH and and and helpful lucky charm and belief to UH.
And then there's then there's a whole realm of pathology
I guess a little O. C. D in a way, right,
so called adventitious reinforcing. And then it is making that
connection and then keep you know, doing whatever that ritual

(22:07):
is over and over again so that you can hopefully,
you know, evoke those spirits of magic to help you
in your quest. So has anyone studied lucky charms? Of course?
Well not the cereal. The cereal that's a whole different
kettle of fish. But but yes, as far as studying
the effects that lucky charms lucky objects have on us, uh,

(22:28):
there's a really cool study from the University of Cologne
in two thousand ten, and uh. They started off with
just golf. They they invited these test subjects to come
and uh and see how many of tin puts they
can make from the same location. And when the experiment
has handed them a golf ball, they would they would

(22:49):
sometimes just give them a ball and say, hey, everyone's
used this ball so far. You know, no big deal.
Here's a golf ball. Why don't you hit it and
see what I'll go in that hole over there. And
then sometimes they said, hey, this ball, all this must
be a lucky ball. This one, this one's really worked
well for people. And then they they analyzed it. They
let everyone play a little golf see what happened, and

(23:10):
the mere suggestion that the ball was lucky significantly influenced performance,
causing participants to make almost two more puts on average.
See this is where like when David Eagleman says like,
we don't have any free will, I began to really
sort of say, you know, he might be onto something,
because the mere suggestion that it's lucky would actually have

(23:30):
some sort of bearing on your performance. That's crazy, you know.
So of course they weren't going to stop just there,
because generally, if you have a scientific experiment, if you
have a study going on, and it begins and ends
with people just playing golf one afternoon, you know that's
probably not enough. You need to push it a little
a little further. So what they did is they had

(23:52):
test subjects come in and they had them them bring
lucky artifacts with them, you know, be at their their
old inky or they're you know like me. You know,
I forgot about this. I always bring this uh Tristeratops
squeeze toy into the office with me. It's true, yeah,
And I don't think of it as a lucky charm.
I think of it more it's like something to occupy

(24:13):
my hand when I'm feeling kind of podcast without it.
I don't podcast without it. So there's a certain amount
of magical thinking involved, their certain amount of good luck
charm going on with that Tristeratops. So anyway, they invited
people to bring in their tri steretops toys. They're they're lucky,
you know, four leaf clovers, what have you and uh.

(24:33):
And then they started the tests. They assigned them to
either a condition where they would be performing a task
in the presence of their charm or in absence of
their charm and uh. And then the participants rated their
perceived level of self efficiency and then completed a memory
task that was essentially a variant of the you know,
the classic card game concentration. So psychologist Lisa and Tomish

(24:57):
she found that those people who had they're lucky charms,
they were doing a couple of things here to improve
their performance, because really it does improve your pose. And
they found once again, if they had their lucky charms
on hand, they did better. Yes, they were setting loftier
goals from for themselves, and then they were exhibiting increased
persistence right they were they did not give up as

(25:20):
easily because they felt bolstered by these lucky charms. Yeah,
it's it's pretty crazy. I mean, it's the idea that
the so here's the try sarratops squishy in my hand
and bringing in I'm thinking, well, I've got to try
saratops with me. I'm gonna you know, I'm not just
gonna go for normal. I'm gonna shoot for higher because
I've got this, I've got the power up in my hand. Well,
and then I'm gonna stay to it more because because

(25:41):
because my I'm focusing with my attention, I have the
the symbol of my my commitment with me as well. Well,
here's where the fun house mirror shutters. If you are
aware of this effect, then supposedly this no longer works anymore.
If you become conscious that you are attributing magical qualities
to an object, then it's supposedly is not going to

(26:04):
be effective, you know. And I don't really I don't
really buy that part of the study. Well, I think
it depends. I think that this depends on the individual,
because for my own part, I find myself able to
drift in and out of believing in things depending on
what my day to day outlook is and depending on,
you know, how I want to view the world, Like
I find myself able to, to a certain extent, you know,

(26:27):
engage in the belief that an object might have some
sort of you know, luck, or believe in some varying
levels of spirituality depending on on how I'm viewing the day.
So I can imagine somebody, you know, logically knowing that
something is just a piece of metal, but then still
buying into it enough to get that effect out of it. Well,

(26:47):
I think that's because you have a creative, fiction twisted
mind that's been trained that way, so you can, I think,
dive into magical thinking very easily, yeah, and then still
be hanging out with reality. But I don't. I'm not
unique in that, and that that that people so, so
I think the study is fascinating. That I do. I

(27:08):
do kind of disagree on that part um about the
idea that just merely by listening to this podcast we
have deactivated all of your lucky charms out there, I
mean some of you, if you're the right kind of person,
that we just totally zapt all of your your magic
do dads? Sorry about that? Yeah, all right, So let's
change the subject and close this podcast out on Ikea,
because I kea. What is this but the the iconic

(27:30):
symbol of all objects known to man that can be
acquired by man, right right, And of course the thing
we always come back to with Ikea anytime we're talking
about I Kea, anytime we're we're thinking about Ikea, and
I'm not talking about in the podcast, but just in general,
all of us is the the assembly of these items.
They come with the really well do well designed graphically instructions,

(27:54):
and you bring them home and you try to make
sense out of them, and then you take one or two,
three or four goes that assembling it correctly penally. With
some there's a little bit it's like going through a
maze because you end up betting a dead corner and
then you realize, oh, I already used those screws in
the wrong spot. Let's see if they can actually be
removed without destroying the product? Is that little is it?

(28:14):
The l Is that a Elan wrench? Yeah? Okay, that
thing is ridiculous to me because you have this, You
have all these pieces in front of you, and then
you have this tiny little Alan wrench that's supposed to
do the job. Well, you can get a screw driver
with the Alan. Well, power tools always come out. That's
the joke of it, right, And I feel like the
the little man that is that is the symbol of

(28:35):
the person that's supposed to be you is overly comical too.
And it's sort of like this commentary on the whole process.
I think he's supposed to be kind of disarming as well,
when you reach the frustration point with it. I see
his passage as being mocking. He's laughing at you. You're
just sitting in the living room floor, just surrounded by
half a symboled furniture. Yeah, yeah, beating away. Yeah, I

(28:57):
mean I have, I have. There have been times when
I've been a sibling like kea furniture, and I love
I keya furniture, but there have been times when I've
been assembling it where I've just about lost my mind. Well, see,
I think that is what plays into this whole idea
of this I key effect, right, right, And this is
the idea ultimately, it's the idea that if we build
something ourselves, even if it's crap, we care more about it.

(29:19):
And you we've all encountered this with people. You know,
it's anybody that knows somebody who engages in a bit
of of art, a bit of creative endeavor would be
it be it be it somebody who's really good at it,
or you know, someone who's new to to the practice.
There's a tendency to to love your own work even
when it's not good. Well, I mean you see this

(29:41):
in fiction writing a lot, right when you're going through
the editing process. Is that what it was the term
kill your children. You don't want to do it, kill
you darlings. You don't want to to This is your
creation and it doesn't fit in and it doesn't really
even matter to the plotline anymore. But it's very hard
to get rid of those things. Yeah, I mean, it's
it's why you need an outsider to come in and
look at your stuff. That's the beauty of the editor. Um,

(30:04):
you know, that's why you know I have awesome ladder
milk around to edit my work for the website, because
otherwise stuff would remain in there that really needs to
be cut. He needs you need a hard, cruel louder milk.
She is not cruel to come in and and and
take out all the unimportant organs, just rip them right
out of the body. Yeah, you do need someone putting

(30:24):
in comments next you work, saying hey, what's up with this? Yeah?
But see this is this really interesting of the Ikea
effect is that you know in the NPR story about
this called Why You Left, that I keep it a
keya table even if it's crooked. Um, they're saying that
people don't have this editor coming in and you see
this in company, see people getting really tied to this
idea of what a product is or what it is

(30:45):
that they're making is sometimes it's two years in the make. Yeah,
you're putting just loads of time and energy into it,
and you're just you're just you're in the jungle with it.
You're in the jungle. And then someone from the outside
comes in and goes, it's crooked. Yeah, you know, um,
and that you need that, you need you need that
sort of fresh perspective. So that's helpful. I mean, we're
we've kind of transitioned away from objects more into um

(31:06):
philosophy here. But hey, mean, isn't that what objects are
doing in the first place. They're just metaphors for us. Really. Yeah,
So the study was big on stressing that that building
your own stuff boost your feeling of pride and competence
signals to others that you were competent, which I think
is is good as well and reminds me of that
decent the Portlandia sketch. Did you see this with the
the duty to builds his own furniture? No? I didn't

(31:29):
see that one. He's he's like the all the women
want to date him and marry him and they can
make make him their own because they learned, oh, he
makes his own furniture, you know, because like it's you know,
it's just the perfect thing, right, But then they find
out that he makes really crappy furniture that he just
doesn't realize it. So so it kind of fits in

(31:50):
with what we're talking about. But the third thing that
they found in the study that was interesting was that, uh,
this is direct quote from the study, threatening consumers sense
of self increases the propensity to make things themselves. So
the idea to the idea here that the author talks
about in this this article is that theoretically, if you
were to provide a visitor to Ikea with a really

(32:13):
difficult math problem to you know, to really bust them
down a few chops and make them make them feel
kind of stupid, then let them into Ikea, they're going
to be even more into the idea of buying something
and building it themselves so they can make good again.
So because they their ego has been taken down a
couple of notches, and then if they can just assemble something,
they can regain that ye idea. I think so because

(32:37):
it's I mean, it's kind of like anything. You know,
whenever you're logged in a in a process that is
just seemingly never ending, that you don't really feel like
there's a sense of completion, or you have one of
those days where you work on eighteen different things and
finish none of them. Like what you really want to
do is is nail something you want to say, I
went home and I made a girl cheese from start
to finish and then I ate it case close close

(32:59):
that loop. Well that would get you a lot of ladies.
Hey he makes cheese. He makes cheese. Yeah, well not
from start to finish, not making your own bread and cheese,
so that would be impressive as well. But yeah, yeah,
I don't know. This is what the author was saying,
is that maybe Ikea could start to game their customers
to their advantage and give them these math problems or
just put up big placards that say, like, you know,

(33:21):
you're awful and lousy. To put some furniture together, you
feel better. Yeah, I mean some people love it. I
know people that are just in love with the idea
of putting together furniture. Well, ikea Hacker is a great
website to seeing what people do to to sort of
change the the or to make it more unique, or
you know, try to game the furniture to havn't have

(33:43):
another purpose. I've been saying for a while that IKEA
needs to do like a game show where the teams
of of IKEA hackers have to like compete against each other,
and maybe they're having to do a symbol furniture in
weird places, like you know, in a hot air balloon
around the subway. But my boy, I think you something there.
Yeah did that sound like nineteen Yeah? A little bit,

(34:04):
a little bit right, So there you go. Objects um,
a little insight into why we've surround ourselveselves with so
much stuff while it's so important. And I was really
I was really interested in you know, we're talking about
that that space, that that that your mind occupies, That
that moment when you're holding something in your hand and
trying to decide whether you can part with it and

(34:25):
throw it away or if it has value that and
needs to be held and maintained like that, That to
me is a very interesting frame of mind um to occupy.
I mean, we've all been there, and uh and and
and we all kind of skew different ways. I think
when when faced with that situation, some of us will
just throw stuff away at the drop of the hat.

(34:46):
My my wife is one and and she's been a
good influence on me and making me more susceptible to
getting rid of things instead of keeping them around needlessly.
So you just have boxes of notes and stuff. Yeah,
you know. Um, if I'm in a store, which don't
really shop that much, but if I'm in their store
and I see something I fancy, I actually will carry
it around for about fifteen minutes to see whether or
not I actually wanted. In nine out of ten times

(35:08):
I put it back. Thank you for joining us today
in this episode. We hope this uh stoke some thought
about your own material possession from what they mean to you.
And if you're interested in learning more about some of
the themes covered today, like say magical thinking, you can

(35:29):
check out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. It's
our online hub for past and present podcast episodes, videos,
and blog posts all related to what we explore here
in this podcast. And if you have thoughts on the
objects in your life that bring you them with pleasure
or even discomfort, we'd like to hear about them. You
can send your words our way by emailing us at
stuff to blow your mind at? How supports dot com

(35:54):
For more on this and thousands of other topics. Does
it has? Stuff works dot Com? Could you leave you
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