The Insidiousness of Things

You may have heard about the series of economics experiments demonstrating the existence of an "endowment effect" - people value something more highly if they own it than if they do not. These experiments have taken different forms, but perhaps the most famous one found that people who have been given a school mug (easily available at the college bookstore) required a higher trading price on the mug than those who are given the opportunity to buy one.

I am not interested right now in debating the merits of these various experiments, under what conditions this divergence between willingness to pay and willingness to accept appears to be greatest or mostly goes away, how this relates to the status quo bias and risk aversion, and why White Elephant exchanges at office Christmas parties are often so boring because people usually just keep whatever trinket they drew totally at random and all that (though those are fascinating questions well worth discussing), but I want to use this as an example: give a kid a crappy university mug and after owning it for just a few moments, they already start to see it as much more valuable than they did a minute before, when it was just a mug sitting on a shelf and not their very own mug. That's how quickly our possessions can start screwing with our minds. If people can be this way about a stupid trifle that they were just now given, imagine how we must be with things that we have purchased because we really wanted them at some time in our lives and that we enjoyed for many years and that we have become ridiculously emotionally invested in. It's frightening.

So I want to remind us all: constant vigilance! Don't let your possessions own you. There's no need to give them so much power. Take a risk - throw it away and have faith that your life will not be harmed by the fact that you no longer have the Strawberry Shortcake shaped eraser that your best friend in 3rd grade (whose name, let's face it, you can hardly even remember without thinking way too hard) gave you or your 4th favorite hammer or a book you read once and didn’t like all that much anyway or a pair of pants you haven’t fit for 15 years or a lifetime supply of scratch paper.

I have long loved this poem by M. S. Merwin. They speak so sweetly, but don't listen to their lies!

Things

Possessor
At the approach of winter we are there.
Better than friends, in your sorrows we take no pleasure,
We have none of our own and no memory but yours.
We are the anchor of your future.
Patient as a border of beggars, each hand holding out its whole treasure,

We will be all the points on your compass.
We will give you interest on yourself as you deposit yourself with us.
Be a gentleman: you acquired us when you needed us,
We do what we can to please, we have some beauty, we are helpless,
Depend on us.