A while ago, my mother accidentaly broke my tea cup. My aunt, who was visiting, told her that it really wasn’t a big deal because it was just a cup. My mother, who knows me better than anyone, knew it wasn’t just ‘a cup’.
Actually, my aunt was right. Probably made in China, along with a million other cups like that and sold all over the world, it was just a ‘cup’. But it was mine. My one, my only, and my mother knew that I was attached to it as with no other object I own.
After the sad news, I embarked myself in the quest of finding another one. I secretly knew I wasn’t going to find a cup exactly like that, so it took me some time to make myself to the idea that I had to replace it. And while some other people buy cups as they buy a toothbrush, to me it was going to be about finding a silent companion who would be by my side on my days and nights of work. It would be about building a whole relationship with a new object.
Humans have built an artificial environment based solely on their interaction with objects. As we evolve, the relationship between humans and objects get more and more intimate. If we go back in time, we’d surely find unique objects that were of great esteem for their users. May them have been jewellery or even weapons that, despite the monetary value they might have had, they were more important because of the amount of time and effort put in their manufacture and the subsequent level of attachment their owners had with them.
We could say the relationships we have with objects nowadays it’s a modern age construction, a consequence of the bourgeois society we live in. But, truth is that we have adapted ourselves and our habits to give those objects the protagonism they have acquired. For example, I am typing this on a computer, which I have named because it’s not just an ensemble of circuits, wires and several other devices; it’s my main work tool and something that I spend a lot of time with.
Now, would it be possible for an athenian to understand the love for my cup? Would it be possible for Karl Marx to understand how a massive product made by a chinese worker would overcome its main goal and make a difference in my life? Well, probably Marx wouldn’t be pleased if he found out that we are no longer alienated from the objects we make, rather than being alienated with them. But humans are, in general terms, defined by what they own, whether we like it or not.
We can’t live without food, but let’s face it, we can’t live without a cell phone or a tv either. We have come to a point in our evolutionary state where our lifes just can’t exist without said objects. And while we cheat ourselves by saying that, if we could, we would live without many objects that we consider innecesary, the truth is that we would eventually end up getting caught in the tricky entanglements we have set up ourselves in relation to those objects. But still, we’d have to admit that if we were in a fire and had twenty seconds to save one object, we’d certainly pick the one that means the most to us, that one object that would define us in a glance. And we could go purist and say that not a single object can define the complexity of any human existance, but we would secretly know that is not true because being human has become, mostly, about being defined by what surrounds us.
I finally got a new cup. It will never be like the old one, but in the end it’s just a matter of time until I develop a whole new bond with it.
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