Objects of Love

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 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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.

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,

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

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 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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

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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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?

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 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 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.

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 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, 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 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

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

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

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

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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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

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