The lyrics of the song, My Favorite Things are made up of emotionally evocative, sentimental items.
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things.
Cream-colored ponies and crisp apple strudels;
Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles;
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings;
These are a few of my favorite things.
They’re all pretty general and poetic. Cream-colored ponies...wild geese flying with the moon on their wings? Fanciful favorites. Kind of saccharine. That’s not the kind of thing I’m thinking about when I think of favorites.
Last week I wrote about taking seriously Jean-Paul Sartre’s observation that “I am what I have” and looking at the things in our lives more closely.
Instead of fanciful items, I’m referring here to the much more mundane, everyday things that become favorites more slowly, finding a place on our “lists” of favorites almost imperceptibly.
Lists of favorites? We all have them, although most of us don’t think about them until we’re asked.
For example, what’s your favorite pair of shoes? How about your favorite candy? Shampoo?
Pieces of clothing, food items, personal care products...all of us have favorites in these and plenty of other categories. Some of them are certified, “if-they-don’t-have-this-I’m-absolutely-not-buying-anything-else” kinds of favorites. Others are of the, “well-I’m-already-here-so-I’ll-get-this-one” variety.
For years, I’ve been fascinated by the psychological processes that turn everyday objects into favorites. I’m especially interested in things in the “if-they-don’t-have-this...” category.
How does that happen? What “qualifies” each thing, giving it a special, sometimes very special place in our lives?
I think the best way to understand these processes is to look at things in our own lives. Let me give you a couple of examples.
Take these two items. A coffee cup and a loaf of bread. Each of them qualifies as one of my favorite things, each has a story, each is, to a greater or lesser degree, mundane. But, they are very different kinds of things with very different histories.
The coffee cup - This cup is one-half of a pair my wife Karen and I bought three Christmases ago. They were created by a friend who is a very accomplished designer. This is mine and Karen has hers (we chose different colors when we bought them and selected the one we preferred on the spot). We drink coffee from them practically every morning. Thinking about this cup, I find that it is one of my favorite things with both functional and emotional components.
First, I love the way this cup looks. The bright, cheerful colors and overlapping circle pattern are a visually pleasant way to start my day. The cup holds just the right amount of coffee for me. It’s not too light or too heavy, even when full. The handle makes it easy for me to hold the cup the way I like to. It keeps freshly poured coffee hot but allows it to cool over a period of time that I find enjoyable. It has been through the dishwasher several hundred times and is now showing signs of fading colors, which does not detract from my attachment. In fact, the fading is the result of our history together, a sign of age and service, like a patina on wood or metal.
Emotionally, the cup reminds me of my friend and the many years we spent working on a wide range of interesting product development projects. His creativity is boundless. That creativity is like an aura that surrounds this object. This cup is a minor example that evokes countless memories of being a small part of a world in which he created the widest range of amazing products I’ve ever seen emerge from a designer’s imagination. Even when I don’t “think about” that creativity and our relationship, both are always there on the horizon of this cup.
Function + emotion = favorite.
The loaf of bread - This is my favorite commercially-produced bread. It is a brand I’ve been eating/buying for over 60 years. I love the flavor of rye bread in a wide range of uses. The seeded variety adds just the right combination of caraway flavor and crunchy texture to the mix. The bread is the perfect size for my favorite kinds of sandwiches. The aroma is distinctive and very pleasant, especially toasted. I am very disappointed when a supermarket is out of stock, and have a hard time considering, never mind buying, a substitute.
When I stop to think about it, I associate this bread with my adolescence. I rode the subway from the Bronx to lower Manhattan every day during high school. In that era, Levy’s launched an ad campaign that’s stuck with me ever since. The label on each loaf says, “Real Jewish Rye.” The identification of the product with being Jewish rooted the bread in a heritage, but not mine. Levy’s, and their ad agency, took this into account and created a campaign that focused on the bread’s origin as a key to its identity and appeal. Levy’s Rye Bread became an emotional product, complete with a clear, short, origin story printed on every package: Real Jewish Rye.
That story was reinforced in the way the brand talked about itself. Here are a few examples from the early 1960s that I remember seeing in subway stations on my way to and from high school.
Not only does the message stress the bread’s heritage, it also gives customers permission to adopt—no to LOVE!—this product regardless of their own.
And, the campaign went further. It moved into the domain of social consciousness by using a wide range of ethnic examples of people who choose (no, not choose, not buy, LOVE!) Levy’s. So, it was not just the bread the brand was inviting customers to love. It was infusing the bread with a social attitude and a sense of humor that was perfectly suited to the spirit of the times. (The campaign ran from about 1961-1970s.) After all, this was “the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” a moment celebrating the transcendent humanity that unites us beneath the things that divide. Eating Levy’s Real Jewish Rye Bread became a social statement for me (unrealized at the time) as well as a bread preference.
Function + emotion = favorite
These are only two small examples of the ways that objects become favorites and of ways that those favorites become part of our life stories. The objects themselves couldn’t be more different from one another. One of them is a unique thing created by a friend. The other a mass produced branded product sold in a supermarket. I have very different relationships with these two objects, yet they are both intertwined with my life story in unique ways.
When we begin to focus on the things we live with, we discover what Maurice Merleau-Ponty would call the invisible lining of the visible world; its meaning. The more familiar we become with our objects’ invisible linings, with their meaning, the more “object literate” we become, and the more careful (“care-full”; “full of care”) we become in how we select, treat, and dispose of them.
In a world of disposability, favorites matter more than ever.
What are some of your favorite things?