No one wants to be the 41-year-old woman who phones a hotel five times to ask if anyone has yet found her missing bear. Alas, this was the anxious situation in which I found myself only this week, when Rufus – the stuffed, beloved object of an amusing family travel tradition that photographs him on tour in exotic locations – somehow embarked on an individual exploration of New Haven, Connecticut while I’d hit the road for New York.
Room 510. I’m the Guardian journalist. Yes, the one visiting for the super highbrow literary festival. The bear is small, fluffy and wearing a bow tie.
Turns out five’s a charm – the errant bear had finally been found wedged in the corner of a laundry chute, would be dispatched to me forthwith and no, this was not the most cringeworthy quest to recover a missing item pursued by the hotel, Ms Badham, it really does happen all the time.
I can believe it. I am one of those people who lose things, and I know I am but one of a tribe. I have a friend named Lachlan who, in the days of scruffier student pasts, left a trail of single forgotten items wherever he travelled, his daily schedule dominated by the activity required to recover the hat, coat, bag or book left behind the day before. In my own time, I’ve lost mobile phones, wallets, keys, my glasses, an entire spare set of clothes, endless pairs of tweezers, umbrellas, a striking embellished cardigan and a splendid peacock chair.
Rarely can I explain the how but science can, at least, explain the why. German researchers have found higher incidences of distraction and forgetfulness can be explained by a variation of a dopamine receptor gene that occurs within 75% of people. Exacerbating the gene’s effects are stress, fatigue and multitasking – concurrent afflictions, I’d suggest, of whatever demanding logistics may cause one to flee a hotel room.
Relocating lost items depends on a deliberate act of memorisation when they are first placed, to imprint into the neurons of the hippocampus an impression of the placement for the brain’s on-cue recall. This is of little use to the 75% of us who are forgetful, who are likely to forget the advice, and find themselves – just one more time – unpacking their bags, emptying cupboards and tearing the cushions out of the furniture to see if Rufus may be hiding in a lost corner of the settee.
It’s not science but moral philosophy that offers the most sympathy towards this torturous panic-hunting for lost things. Moral philosophers argue that as we identify ourselves with the things we care about, so do we make ourselves vulnerable to a feared loss of self when memories of emotional connections are so entwined with objects associated with them – like my family is with the mass-market bear whose disappearance provoked in me a sense of shameful responsibility and intimate betrayal.
In the age of mechanical reproduction, we may have lost our reverence for the sacred power we once imbued in tools, icons and artworks created by the individual human hand – but we have not lost our capacity to invest in material things an equally potent power of personalised narrative.
It’s fitting that I write this from New York; it was here between 2009-2010 that Joshua Glenn collaborated with writer Rob Walker from New York Times Magazine to test his theory that affixing narratives to objects may increase their economic worth. They hired professional writers to create stories for a collection of $1.50-a-piece junk objects that they sold on eBay, where “the newly significant objects sold for as much as 2,700% of their value”. You can, you see, agglomerate your own emotional detail by purchasing the material of someone else’s from the internet.
Considering whether the psychological risk of this attachment to objects grows with their number in your life is also pertinent question in this particular corner of the world. In America, the number of individual possessions are said to have doubled over 50 years, the average household is now estimated to house 300,000 items and the population is spending $1.2tn annually on non-essential items.
Even given the likelihood of emotional neutrality towards certain forks, laundry buckets and pencils, there are lots of places for projected tenderness to be dispersed. Perhaps it’s why “you don’t want to turn into the Collyer brothers” yet remains in the local idiom as a warning to materialistic children. New York’s infamous sibling hoarders were found dead in 1947 surrounded by over 140 tons of collected items – mostly garbage – that they’d booby-trapped to protect.
Buddhism is not alone in its spiritual advice of practiced non-attachment to objects as a means of avoiding emotional possession by what one should perhaps merely possess. My reaction to hearing the news that the family bear had been found entailed immense relief and some joyous texts home to my mum, but it’s a reminder that the possession I’m unable to lose is my forgetfulness gene and the awareness is many other things but serene.
