The totality of my possessions reflects the totality of my being. I am what I have.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre wrote those words in Being and Nothingness in 1949. They are odd words for us to try to understand coming from one of the stalwarts of existential philosophy. How can my being…what I am…be reduced to the totality of the things I possess? Sartre must be signaling that the objects we curate, select, and gather in our lives must be more significant than we might expect from mere things.
What do we call the totality of our possessions? I mean, every single thing you own and have in your world. We don’t really have a simple term to capture that idea. George Carlin simply called this totality, “my stuff.”
I’m thinking about this idea in reference to both my forthcoming book, and to the recent tragic events we’ve watched unfolding in California. In the book, I try to understand the network of meaning about our lives that our objects collectively help us express.
What is the cohesive bond that holds these (hundreds? thousands?) of objects together and makes them “mine”? Are they all like the molecules in my body, coming together to form vital organs and functional components? Are some more critical than others to the “totality of my being?” Am I consciously aware of the role that each of the objects in my life plays in making up my being, or are some easily overlooked and underestimated while others are undeservedly elevated?
The force that holds my assemblage of objects together must be a powerful bond because the “mineness” of the objects is palpable; our species has evolved a wide range of ways for me to identify and protect my objects. We develop special relationships with many of them that infuses them with a power that we will risk our own lives to protect. Witness the stories of people who venture back into burning homes to “save” a treasured object from destruction, sometimes one with little or no extrinsic, or monetary value. On a small scale, we all know the protective feeling of seeing one of our objects even mistakenly picked up by another person… “No, no, wait: that’s my scarf…”
Now, imagine that whole collection of objects, Sartre’s totality of our possessions, disappearing in a moment.
The best estimates are that over 12,000 homes were totally destroyed since the California fires broke out on January 7. The latest census estimates are that 2.85 persons per household lived in those approximately 12,000 homes. That means that roughly 42,750 people were displaced by the fires. Conservatively, that means that probably 40,000 individuals experienced the disappearance of either a significant majority or the totality of their possessions.
How many objects disappeared? That’s an impossible number to estimate with any degree of confidence. How many objects would you have lost if you were one of those 40,000 people? How many books, shoes, shirts? How many kitchen utensils? Photographs? Sofas, lamps, TVs? Everything. The totality of your possessions…
Is it unrealistic to imagine that every one of those 40,000 people lost, on average, 500 objects? I know my tally would have been much higher. But let’s stick with 500. That’s a combined total of 20 million objects lost by these individuals…a staggering number, ranging from running shoes to Keith Haring paintings.
Does losing those objects signal the loss of “the totality of their being” for each of those 40,000 people?
In one sense, obviously not; each of them is still alive. So, something of their being persists.
We have heard a lot of people expressing an understandable sentiment: “we were lucky; no one was killed or injured in our household.” At least 25 people were not so lucky. And we all nod and find ways to contribute to the efforts to provide aid and comfort to the victims.
But, what has been lost?
I find myself in the odd position of thinking about those 20 million objects. Well, not the objects, exactly, but the effects of the losses on the thousands of individual identities that the objects bolstered. Because the objects we accrue over a lifetime are not randomly chosen bits of matter; they are selected to help us accomplish something in our lives. They meant something to us…sometimes something trivial, sometimes something poignant…and we enrolled them as allies, elements in our journey to fulfill the needs, wants, desires, wishes, and dreams that energize our lives.
The carefully curated curio cabinet that was the home for the results of a lifetime of searching for just the right figurine to complete an irreproducible collection…and which provided a special feeling of prideful accomplishment for the collector. What about the cherished family heirlooms passed along for generations in the hope that our inspiring, stalwart (sometimes hilarious or absurd!) predecessors would not be forgotten? The trivial bits of ephemera that meant nothing to anybody else but evoked choked-back tears in a youngster. All gone.
Is it sacrilegious to consider the “spirits” of those objects in moments like these? Our culture is notoriously pragmatic on this count. The objects were, after all, just inanimate things…collections of atoms. Some of them had great monetary value but others were simply trinkets picked up along the way.
But when we think of the shock (the trauma) of the loss of those 20 million things, it’s obvious that many of them had been infused with the stuff of life and can never be replaced. They were characters in the ongoing life stories of the 40,000 or so individuals who cherished them in widely varying degrees…some will never be thought of again; some will never be forgotten.
Those 40,000 people are already gathering new things. New objects will present opportunities for new “plot twists” in life stories. Many of those who have experienced these losses will attempt to reconstruct their lives in thematically similar ways, reconstructing their lives with the “assistance” of new objects that express the same needs, wants, desires, wishes, and dreams, the same lifestyles. Others will use this milestone to alter their life direction by eschewing old object-relationships and forming new ones that better express a new moment in their lives; a new style of life.
All who have been affected will experience some form of de-attachment from the lost objects. Some of these things, like an amputee’s phantom limb, will remain palpable and painful in their absence. Others will simply slip away, maybe swept up in a secret wave of being relieved of a responsibility that had become burdensome.
Each object will contribute some element to the ongoing drama that fire victims are constructing. Recovery from an event like this is a deeply creative challenge that will establish a “before/after” moment in each affected individual’s life. Given all that, we should expect to see a wide range of methods for people to re-establish “the totality of their being” and redefine themselves in terms of the possessions they now have and the ones they seek to acquire. Life stories that were settled into established patterns will be rewritten in unforeseeable ways.
Again, poet Muriel Rukeyser’s words ring true: “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.”
Tom Guarriello is a psychologist, consultant, and founding faculty member of the Masters in Branding program at New York’s School of Visual Arts. He’s spent over a decade teaching psychology-based courses like The Meaning of Branded Objects, as well as leading Honors and Thesis projects. He’s spearheaded two podcasts, BrandBox and RoboPsych, the accompanying podcast for his eponymous website on the psychology of human-robot interaction. This essay was originally posted on Guarriello’s Substack, My Favorite Things.
Header image by André Lopes, Unsplash+
The post My Favorite Things: Reflecting on Loss After the Devastation of Fire appeared first on PRINT Magazine.