Abstract
When people fail to locate a personal belonging, it often evokes disturbing reflections of self that they will seek to overcome. While ethnomethodology once manufactured breaches in the taken-for-granted order to reveal the implicit rules of social life, this article explores how people try to recover from such breaches occurring naturally in their material environment. Drawing on a database of about five hundred cases of naturally occurring losses collected through several ethnographic techniques, this article demonstrates how people get back to life as usual through four unique paths. Through each, individuals resolve or avoid the disturbances caused when their taken-for-granted sense of what objects are immediately available to them breaks down.
When attempts to locate an object fail, they offer insights into social psychology. After realizing that an object has gone missing, individuals are often troubled by unsettling reflections of self. They can no longer count on the practical and emotional enhancements of self that the object affords or, more disturbingly, rely on their customary sense of competency in managing their possessions. As they try to find the missing object, individuals also search for ways to escape or forestall these forms of disquiet, sometimes preserving or restoring their sense of self by relinquishing the effort to find the object.
Every response, from apathetic resignation to endless searching, involves a folk theory of what has actually been lost and an informal experiment in what it takes to resist or defuse the negative reflections of self that the loss threatens to generate. Through strategic maneuvering, individuals find ways to avert the tumult aroused by the loss, though each comes with its own pitfalls and sacrifices. Recovering the lost object does not necessarily bring resolution, and sometimes the situation is resolved without finding the object at all.
This study analyzes four different ways in which individuals overcome the challenges posed by losing such personal possessions as a cell phone, a set of keys, a wedding ring, or a purse or wallet and manage the uncomfortable reflections of self that are provoked by the discovery of their loss.
Moving On from Breaches in the Taken-for-Granted
Sociologists have documented what happens when the tacit, taken-for-granted order of social life comes under threat, but few have examined how people move on from these unsettled states. In his effort to tease out the underlying rules of sociality, Harold Garfinkel (1967) set up “breaching experiments” to examine how violations of the accustomed order evoke moral responses in their perceived victims. He reported the awkwardness that individuals feel when someone enters an elevator and stands facing the “wrong” way. He showed that some people become angry when their tic-tac-toe competitor erases their mark and substitutes his or her own. He identified the upset unsuspecting families experience when one of their members suddenly exhibits amnesia and ignores the familial bond, treating the home as a hotel. Garfinkel was interested in the underlying rules of social interaction that become visible when they are violated, and he did not explore, in any great detail, what people do after they notice that the social order has been disturbed.
These experiments provide some clues, however, that individuals experiencing a breach in the orderliness of social interaction may take remedial actions that alleviate frustration and calm anger. In an experiment in which subjects were led to believe they were participating in a study of a novel kind of counseling, for instance, each was paired with a person who was portrayed as a counselor-in-training. The person posing as the counseling trainee responded to the subject’s genuine questions with random “yes” and “no” answers, giving them what at times amounted to contradictory advice. Although some subjects expressed confusion and frustration over the apparent contradictions, many tried to make sense of the answers, and some actually reached such an understanding despite the randomness of the responses they received. In making some kind of sense from the counselor’s answers, subjects typically moved toward a resolution of their initial confusion and dismay.
Shifting from experimentation into naturally occurring social life, Melvin Pollner (1974) described the paths a person charged with a traffic violation and a police officer take when they meet in traffic court to maintain a largely taken-for-granted sense that they do in fact share a world in common despite their disagreement over what happened on the street. Rather than perceiving a breach in their assumption of a shared reality, they transform the ontological challenge, the struggle over whose account is true, into a moral one. In a variety of ways, each levels a claim about why the other, due to some kind of defect in their power of observation or honesty in reporting it, must be unable to tell the court what “really” happened. Pollner’s study shows how individuals attempt to restore an untroubled sense of intersubjectivity when flirting with its breach.
Following in this tradition of work, this project focuses on the effort to move on from challenges to individuals’ taken-for-granted grounding in the material environment that arise from losing track of a material object. In documenting how individuals seek to recover the sense of untroubled possession in the face of their discovery that their mastery of objects may in fact be tenuous or illusory, it shows the ways commonplace material things elicit particular kinds of self- consciousness. It shows that individuals’ sense of self is dynamically intertwined with how their possessions are arranged around them. Losing personal belongings creates a breach in their expectations, and their responses to this predicament suggest that a resolution may form through an effort to retrieve the lost object, even if it is unsuccessful.
Methods
Part of a larger investigation into the nature of property loss, this study is based on just over five hundred cases of people losing everyday items. The data come from four distinct collection strategies pursued from 2006 to 2008 in Los Angeles and several other cities. First, I observed forty-four naturally occurring losses in public places, eavesdropping on and sometimes speaking with folks at the booths, offices, and service counters that handle inquiries about lost and found objects at airports, malls, grocery stores, coffee shops, farmers markets, festivals, sporting events, museums, concerts, and similar venues.
The second strategy involved soliciting and receiving 397 first-person narratives of recent and vivid experiences of property loss. Four-fifths came from people who had posted a solicitation on a lost-and-found Web site such as craigslist.com and lostandfound.com. About one out of four responded to my request for a step-by-step description of the event. These narratives averaged two and a half single-spaced pages in length, and about half of the informants responded to follow-up questions whereby I tried to clarify murky descriptions and patch incomplete narratives. In an effort to obtain the whole story, I requested updates from a third of all informants either three months, one year, or two years later.
I also completed forty-four face-to-face interviews with people who had recently lost something. Participants were selected either through a snowball sampling procedure or a chance meeting. During these open-ended, semistructured interviews, I asked my informants to describe the details of a recent experience in which they had lost an object from beginning to end. Typically, these interviews lasted 10 to 20 minutes and were recorded as jottings in situ.
Fourth, I had twenty undergraduate students keep a journal of their everyday losses and related experiences over the course of a month. These “lost things journals” were an attempt to get at the personal experiences of loss that people would otherwise not reveal to others because the events were trivial, fleeting, or embarrassing. On average, each student reported about ten losses within the one-month period. The study’s findings derive from the technique of analytic induction as described by Charles C. Ragin (1994) and Howard S. Becker (1998).
Ways of Moving On
In contrast to Garfinkel’s experiments, which were about how unsuspecting people respond to having the rug pulled out from under them, this study is about how people regain their balance and move on. It reports how individuals evade the social-psychological obstacles aroused by losing personal belongings. I found that they pursued one of four paths: (1) moving on without searching for the lost object, (2) resolving the problem by successfully recovering the lost object, (3) moving on despite failing to find it, and (4) moving on by replacing it.
Ways of Moving On
Typically, the paths toward moving on from property loss are paved with obstacles deriving from one of three dimensions of self-reflection: how individuals see themselves in light of having lost personal possessions; how individuals imagine others see them; and how individuals experience their world without the symbolic and/or practical scaffolding conferred by the lost object.
Moving on without searching
To find closure without searching is the shortest path, and often the first to emerge after discovering a loss. It affirms that one’s current course of conduct is greater than the value of potentially recovering the missing object. Allegiance to one’s ongoing path and resistance to the effort that searching entails moves an individual on in one of two ways: either to deny that the object is permanently lost and imagine that it will reappear on its own or to embrace the idea that the object has been lost irretrievably.
The first route emerges when, realizing that a possession has unexpectedly disappeared, individuals avoid a sense of loss and the damning reflections of self it evokes by denying that anything is threateningly absent. They believe, and at times hope, that the thing is probably around the house, the office, the car, or wherever, but at the moment is hidden from them for some reason. They might still want the item, and can imagine a time in the not-so-distant future when they will really need it, but they decide to allow the item to reveal itself naturally. They go on with life as usual, suppressing anxieties that might compel them to search for it immediately and betting that it will turn up in the course of their normal routine. They go on with a sense that the object is not at risk of becoming even more thoroughly concealed or, worse, permanently lost.
The absence does not point to a failing in the person because they feel that chaotic forces have descended upon them temporarily. They point to conditions that make it difficult to find something: the fact that their house is a bit messy or that they are engaged in a consuming project at work and cannot keep proper track of things. Maneesh, a 30-year-old graduate student in economics living in San Diego, preserved a sense of self-efficacy in his management of objects. After briefly looking around for his misplaced laundry room key and feeling mildly frustrated, Maneesh decided, “No big deal, I’ll just wait until the key pops up on its own. The place is a mess; it’s around here somewhere.” He noted that he would rather wear “slightly soiled clothes” than spend his time searching for a “needle in a haystack,” especially since he was sure that the key would show up eventually. By avoiding a search in this way, individuals maintain a self that is independent from the absent object. Putting off the search affirms the idea that who they really are is not affected by the object’s absence. Maneesh put off searching for the key for a week, effectively saying that not having the key and, by extension, being unable to wash his clothes did not unsettle him enough to require immediate action.
Another way to put off a search and to hold on to the sense that one’s self has not been fundamentally affected is by understanding that internally derived chaotic forces, such as feeling tired or having consumed too much alcohol, are temporarily getting in the way. Katie, a 21-year-old student in Boulder, decided not to look for her keys until the next morning since she has trouble finding things when she is “beyond buzzed,” as she put it. That she cannot readily find something is not a sign of anything deficient about her abilities; rather, she had other things going on at the moment.
Moving on derives from the individual’s sense that the thing will reappear eventually, that in the normal course of life it will serendipitously reveal itself—a belief that suggests a kind of metaphysical connection between self and object that will make a difference once the chaotic forces pass. Individuals demonstrate this sensibility when they redirect their initial concern about an absence and settle on a strategy of serendipity. When Renee realized she had not seen her Kodak digital camera for a suspiciously long time after returning from a ski trip, she reasoned, “My ski jacket has an inner coat and outer shell, each with pockets. My ski pants also have pockets. Then there is the question of whether it was in the boot bag, my purse, my carry-on backpack, or a pocket in my suitcase. Then I wondered if it had fallen out of a bag and was in my brother’s car or had slipped under the bed. With so many places where it could be stashed, I truly believed it would just show up without me having to look for it.”
If and when the thing reemerges on its own, individuals get a double reward. The loss or gap is plugged and their hunch is confirmed. The latter can also convey a supportive emotional sense that the universe is conspiring in their favor. But when the absent object does not reappear or is not forgotten, individuals reevaluate the object’s absence and reconsider whether life without it is okay or they need to begin a recovery effort.
When seeing the absence as unthreatening does not appear compelling, individuals shift to the second method of moving on without searching: accepting a sense that the self is powerless to retrieve the object as a safeguard against a sense of self enmeshed in a struggle whose outcome is uncertain. Sensing one’s impotence in the face of possibly surmountable obstacles feels humbling but also freeing compared to the imagined alternative of a self mired in a difficult recovery effort with no guaranteed exit strategy.
People discover the impotent self as an attractive identity project through cost-benefit analysis, either reflectively or through a gut feeling. They weigh the value of the object against the imagined effort that searching for it requires. Sometimes this calculation depends on their schedule, whether they have time to suspend belief in its unrecoverability and check things out. For instance, when Pedro, a 24-year-old living in Boston and working for an educational nonprofit, was out running, he noticed his watch was missing and momentarily ran in place as he considered its value and the cost of a recovery effort. In the end, he chose to search for it. “I check my watch . . . to see how I’m doing . . . and it’s not there. Fuck! I think back . . . that must have been the sound I heard. Shit, now I’m going to be late for my date, I’ve got to run all the way back to where it fell . . . and it’s a nice watch, sitting right there on the sidewalk. I’d be lucky if it was still there. After moping for about 10 seconds, I turn around and run back.”
Through other calculations, the loss emerges as such an unwanted burden that people immediately try to forget about it, angling their whole disposition against making any effort to recover it. When Hassan, a 25-year-old Brooklyn filmmaker, discovered that his half-rimmed glasses were missing, he was straining to find his iPod, cell phone, and cigarettes—what he calls his “various metro-centricities”—in the diminished light of a setting sun. When he realized that his glasses were missing, he instantly deduced what likely happened to them. “I had a lot of walking ahead of me, as I was walking from Chelsea to Union Square. I was feeling particularly good, as I had just dropped off a movie I’d been working on to be sent to Sundance. I stopped at a crosswalk and took off my blazer and slung it over my canvas shoulder bag. The top end of the jacket was hanging upside-down, behind me, over the bag. It was in the following 10 minutes of walking that I must have lost my glasses.” Though Hassan knew he could return to that location, he was not motivated to do so. “I had some time to kill. But I took it more as a sign that perhaps it was never meant to be. I could just picture myself, my head down as I walked, retracing my steps, scanning the ground through crowds of rush-hour on-foot commuters, bumping into grumpy, self-righteous suits. And then either (A) not finding them, or, even worse, (B) finding them broken. No thanks. So I went to Union Square and ate some Thai.” For Hassan, resigning himself to a life without his glasses felt easy. He noted that, having found them just recently after they had been missing for four years, the loss seemed less a chance occurrence and more the fate of those particular glasses. From his point of view, he’s simply not meant to have them.
While some draw on their troubling history with the current and other lost objects, others sense a host of circumstances pacifying their motivation to search. When Amy, a 25-year-old teacher living in Boston, realized she had dropped her keys, “it was later in the evening and I had no energy to make the 20-minute and two big hills bike trip back in the dark to search out the keys along my route. I actually had duplicates of my important keys, which made things easier. This was probably the reason I didn’t ever go back to search the route for my keys. I figured if they were there, I probably wouldn’t see them, being under a car along the road or they were already crushed by city traffic.” In deciding not to try to recover a mislaid object, some people are convinced that any effort to retrieve it would be futile, pacified not by the insignificance of the item but rather by the opposite. Nick, a 26-year-old business consultant living in San Francisco, dropped his wallet during the “annual Bay to Breakers event, at which thousands of people run or walk a designated route in San Francisco from one body of water to another. I recognized that any one of thousands of people could have found my wallet, so it didn’t seem useful to do a physical search of the park route.” By casting the lost object as unrecoverable, individuals continue on their path.
Individuals who move on after losing an object without searching may either evade a sense of a threatening absence by seeing the missing possession as likely to return on its own or embrace a sense of their own impotence to recover it. But if they are unable to sidestep their loss, individuals may invest in a search effort.
Moving on by recovering the lost object
There is no guarantee that finding the lost object will bring immediate closure. Individuals must transcend the experience of loss for the object’s recovery to move them on. They must believe that the thing that has returned is essentially the same thing that disappeared, despite recovering it from what they perceive to be polluted hands or in a different working order. They must believe that the loss was somewhat of a fluke and they are not at an ongoing risk of losing the object again because of its extreme delicacy. They cannot remain baffled by the mysterious route through which it ended up in a particular location or passed through someone else’s hands. They must also overcome any sense of embarrassment about not recovering it sooner, or overlooking what in hindsight appear as tell-tale signs of its now-obvious hiding place.
Individuals reach a firm resolution through recovery when the object is recovered from a location that suggests it was reasonably mislaid and reasonably not looked for there, even when the initial vanishing was baffling. When JJ, a personal chef in her 40s living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, lost two rings, the mysterious circumstances overwhelmed her. “I was absolutely confident that I had put them where I always do. Not having done that has shaken me horribly. I feel completely distracted and crazy. I wander from room to room in our tiny apartment, looking over and over again in places I have looked so many times before.” When she happened upon the rings by chance some days later, the recovery provided the clues she needed to defuse her anxiety. Like the abrupt resolution to an ancient Greek tragedy, the thing plays the part of deus ex machina, resolving the otherwise inexplicable problem with its sudden reemergence. She reported,
I have a few aprons, which live on a hook in the kitchen. I checked the pockets over and over in my search to find my rings, but yesterday when I was straightening up a cupboard I found one that had been misplaced with my dish towels, which I use all the time. In grabbing at them, usually in a hurry to get at something hot, or to wipe my hands and keep cooking, this wandering apron had been pushed to the very back of the bunch. When I found it yesterday I hung it back on its hook. Later when I was making dinner I grabbed for an apron and it was at the top of the pile. While I was doing all of my evening tasks I heard something in the pocket. I reached in, thinking “maybe . . . ?” but sure I was going to pull out two dimes, or buttons, or anything but my rings, as I had so many times before. And then there they were, in my hand, and I had to look at them for a good 15 seconds to be sure.
In other cases, rather than defusing inexplicable details of its vanishing, the successful recovery unearths them, transforming the loss of the object into a loss of reasonable expectations. When Crystal, a mother in her early 40s living in Washington, D.C., lost her wallet, for several days she scoured all the places she thought it could be, but when “six little skateboard dudes” showed up at her house with the soggy wallet she was baffled. The missing details gnawed at her as she tried to fashion a reasonable explanation.
I asked the boys where they found my wallet and they said “near the sewer across the street.” Apparently one of the boys lodged his skateboard in the sewer and while getting it out he noticed my wallet lying in a puddle of water. Right across the street from my house? How did it get there? I told them where I had thought I lost it, which was several miles away, and they couldn’t believe where they found it either. The location where it was found raised more questions than answers. Had I lost it in the driveway? If so, how did it get across the street and down a ways? I recalled the recent forecast, thinking, it hadn’t rained recently. I thought maybe the person who found it came by my house but saw me at home and didn’t want to get in trouble for taking the $100 so they threw it across the street, thinking that would be good enough for me to find it. . . . I still want to know the full story of where my wallet had been. As if it had been on an adventure without me and I was entitled to know every detail. The wallet had a life of its own.
These puzzling recoveries compel individuals to hunt down explanations that abide by the laws of physics that do not allow things to disappear and reappear willy-nilly.
If it is not mysterious forces and their baffling reflections of self that recoveries alternately pacify and excite, recoveries regularly evoke reflections of self as careless or otherwise incompetent that must be dealt with in moving on. When individuals recover a lost possession from a place they have already looked or know they should have looked, resolution comes by dealing with these apparent shortcomings in their investigative measures. When Nicki, a 24-year-old social worker living in Toronto, lost her wallet somewhere in the city, she searched exhaustively but failed to recover it. In a last-ditch effort, she called the local transportation authority’s lost-and-found office, which informed her that it had been turned in several days earlier. “It is difficult to describe the mix of emotions I felt then, but it was a mix of relief, joy, and embarrassment that I hadn’t just called that number in the first place.”
A successful recovery also fails to grant an immediate sense of resolution when individuals perceive themselves as having cried wolf. When individuals get others involved in recovering a lost object and then they themselves find it somewhere obvious, resolution comes by dealing with how they suspect others will see them in light of the recovery. After Randi, a 25-year-old living in San Diego, lost her driver’s license—or “drinking permit,” as she calls it—and ransacked her whole house, she came up empty-handed and decided to make the dreaded trip to the DMV for a replacement. After expressing her irritation with the ordeal to her housemates and asking them to check a few places for her, she stumbled onto the card in what seemed an obvious location. “There it was, sitting right underneath [my] jeans. I was happy and irritated. I was going to the DMV and everyone knew it. I was half tempted to tell them I went anyway. But that seemed like too much effort and I just explained that I’m mildly retarded and it was exactly where I had thought it had been.”
While individuals are cooling out unsavory reflections of self as they search for an object, they must also resist other lines of closure. Finding closure through recovery means doing whatever it takes to maintain the belief that success is possible and repressing the impulse to give up. In some cases, that means resisting getting a replacement because that seems like an admission of defeat. When Nicholas, a 24-year-old writer and musician living in San Francisco, lost his spiral notebook full of creative ideas for stories and songs, he reports, “I did no writing for the entire week. I had nothing to write in. I couldn’t find the strength to buy a new notebook because that would mean admitting the old ones were truly lost. If I started a new one now, I’d have to commit to it, and I wasn’t ready for that because I hadn’t finished the old ones. So I tried to busy myself with other work and pretend it didn’t matter, but the loss was slowly sinking in. I refused to believe yet that they were gone for good.”
A successful recovery of the serendipitous sort may fail to bring individuals to closure, not because of its unsettling revelations, but because they have already found some kind of peace with the object’s absence. For instance, after Emmanuel, a 27-year-old web developer living in Denver, lost a journal, he slowly made peace with its absence and then, several years later, happened upon it in his martial arts studio. “It was a very nice thing to find my [journal] finally, but I had spent the last couple of years starting a new one and trying to redo all of the writing I had lost, that it didn’t make such an impact to find it again. It was fun to flip through and review my old writing, but that was about it.” He expressed surprise and happiness about its return, but conceded that he was not freed from any unresolved feelings.
When individuals move toward closure after recovering a lost object, they work to control the forces that threaten to keep them in a state of loss. But when recovery does not seem immediately forthcoming, individuals may find a kind of closure through failure. As with successful recoveries, individuals must overcome a set of recurring challenges to self for failure to take them back “home.”
Moving on by abandoning a failed search
While there is no guarantee that a successful recovery will automatically bring a sense of closure to individuals who have lost something, with the right conditions in place an unsuccessful effort will. People recurrently move toward closure without having found a lost object by developing a sense that they have put in a “good effort,” that they have done what any reasonable person could do in such a situation and do not have to bear the burden of a guilty conscience. As the unsuccessful search can theoretically go on as long as someone lives, at some point the strategy to find the thing turns into a strategy for getting over the effort to find the thing. As all search projects start a narrative thread that implies an ending, individuals sense that doing something to try to find the thing prepares them to give up trying to find it.
Through such resolution-producing, yet failed recovery work, individuals discover a reflection of themselves as careful and thorough, as people who, though they occasionally lose something, are still deserving of nice things. When Michael, a 31-year-old Broadway actor living in New York City, lost his engagement ring after he “carelessly” placed it in a shoe before taking the field at a softball game, he felt “very guilty” for losing such a “treasured item.” After thoroughly, but unsuccessfully, searching the dugout and field with a metal detector purchased from Radio Shack the next day, he felt a sense of resolution, but his fiancée, Eva, did not. “Eventually we decided to quit [looking], convinced that we’d done everything we could. If there was a ring there still we would have found it. I felt a sense of closure after the extensive search, but Eva began to get upset. She’d really thought that we’d find it with the metal detector and was now mad at me for being careless with the ring. There were definitely better places to store it than a shoe, and it probably would have been just fine on my finger anyway.”
Though the “good effort” path to resolution is not something individuals regularly cite as a strategy guiding their treatment of a loss, in some search situations people know full well that it will let them sleep at night. Anna, a 28-year-old graduate student at Emory University, reported, “I figured if the hat was gone, I could deal with it if I knew that we checked every possible place I had been that night.”
The sense of having put in a “good effort” also emerges when a search effort must end prematurely because of what individuals sense to be legitimate obstacles. For instance, when individuals imagine that the lost object could be almost anywhere and any effort appears futile, they may cite needle-in-a-haystack circumstances as an insurmountable obstacle that effectively excuses them from further effort. Vicky, a 27-year-old manager at a company in New York City, conveys this sentiment after coming to multiple dead ends in her search for her bracelet.
Clearly the bracelet is so gone. Maybe it fell off in the first restaurant or the second, maybe it got swept up unnoticed or maybe a waiter found it, maybe it tumbled off while I was walking and some passerby caught the light gleaming off the gold and picked it up in a most lucky turn of events for him, maybe it fell off into the subway tracks. . . . The possibilities are endless, far too endless, and after a week of contemplating every conceivable way I could have lost it, as though I could at least reconstruct the exact moment of loss, I am done.
While some, like Vicky, find closure through what they perceive to be insurmountable practical obstacles to a search, others end unsuccessful searches and relinquish the possibility of recovery to leave an unsettling image of self behind. While looking around the dance floor of a crowded nightclub, Andrea, a 21-year-old art student in New York City, worried about what others thought of her as she and several others tried to track down her errant cell phone.
[My friend] had gone the extra mile: she’d recruited the help of the bouncer. They were busy bobbing between the crowd, peeking around the high-heels and trainers with his trusty mini-torch. That made me incredibly embarrassed. . . . Losing my cell phone was one thing, but looking like “that girl” is another. You know that girl. You don’t want to be that girl. That drunken, idiot who loses her cell phone in a bar. . . . But I didn’t say anything besides “thank you very much anyway” when they returned empty-handed.
Andrea’s embarrassment pushed her toward closure by forbidding her from searching further for her cell phone.
While catching a reflection of themselves as “uncool” prompts some to abandon their search, others end their effort by catching an unsettling reflection of themselves when they meet people with relative expertise in lost property. A few days after Lizzie, a 41-year-old journalist living in Santa Barbara, lost her gold ring “somewhere around town,” she tried the local pawn shop, “but those guys seemed amused that I’d think I could find my ring there. One said if my ring was stolen, it was in Mexico getting new documents and that the gold had probably been reduced down by now. I felt a little naive in front of those guys at the thought that I could just walk in there and find it.”
Beyond the social pressures to give up, search efforts also come to an excusable end when people run into access issues deriving from the seemingly circuitous lost and found procedures of a place of business or public institution. Rather than feeling guilt for stopping a search prematurely, losing parties feel frustrated by a sense of impotence in the face of greater powers. For instance, when Javier, a student at the New School, believed he had left his violin on a commuter train, he encountered difficulty with the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s (MTA’s) lost-and-found office. “I call MTA to see what their policies are about lost and found items. After trying the number many times over . . . I manage to get hold of someone only to discover that you must wait 7 to 10 business days before you should call them. They do not get daily updates. As absurd as this seems I could do nothing short of traveling from station to station along the route asking everyone in the ticket booths if something had been returned.”
While Javier moved toward closure after hitting a seemingly insuperable bureaucratic obstacle, others bring their recovery efforts to an excusable, though begrudging, end when they uncover signs that the item was stolen and is virtually irretrievable. Faced with this conviction, individuals may give up. Pat, a 48-year-old freelance graphic artist living in Berkeley, reconstructed how she had lost a piece of jewelry: “After I dropped off my daughter I stopped at a gas station . . . and got out of the car forgetting the ring on its chain was on my lap. That is how it happened. The ring simply fell off my lap when I got out of the car. I am pretty sure I will never see that ring again. I noticed at that time that on the ground at the gas station was a little tiny zip-lock bag used for the distribution of methamphetamine or crack cocaine. I just know that some junkie took my ring.” Convinced that any recovery attempt was hopeless, Pat treated the object as stolen.
In addition to ending a search because of a sense of impotence and to avoid disconcerting reflections of self, individuals stop searching because they do not want the loss to burden those around them. When Mike, a 33-year-old pastor at Valley Christian Fellowship in Northern California, lost the receipt to his church’s projector, he enlisted his staff to help locate it so they could take a tax write-off. “They were all completely invested for an hour. And I could’ve looked for another hour or two easily but I quit because I didn’t want the staff bothered by it anymore. If I was looking, I know they would have demanded to help. But . . . I didn’t want to burden them with it.”
When individuals reach a sense of closure through a failed search effort, they often see the lost object as having purely sentimental value, something that cannot be replaced. But when individuals reach a sense of failure without a sense of resolution, they often try to get on with life by replacing it.
Moving on by replacing the thing
Replacing a lost item is no guarantee that individuals will overcome the burdens of having lost it. If they turn to a replacement too early, individuals feel wasteful, as if they are just throwing one thing away and picking up another. If they replace something with what turns out to be an inadequate substitute, the loss continues to bother them. By trying to replace something that has irreplaceable value, individuals sense the ineffectiveness of their efforts.
When Rob, an American software engineer on a business trip in London, lost the wedding ring he had worn for 20 years, he put in an exhaustive search before deciding to replace it with an exact replica made by a jeweler in London. But the replacement never quite felt right, and he continued to make phone inquiries to lost-and-found offices around London. He noted, “I wear that one now, but it is not the same. I still make efforts, no matter how futile, to find it.” Jackie, a realtor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, replaced her nearly 30-year-old charm bracelet, hoping that it would assuage her feelings of loss. But after duplicating some of the original charms, she begrudgingly conceded that the “meaning is not there.” For some, the shortcomings of the replacement will spur another round of searching.
While some discover that their lost objects have irreplaceable value by actually replacing them and then feeling the inadequacies of the substitutes, others sense right away that the lost object cannot be satisfactorily replaced. When Laura, an adjunct professor of graphic design at a southern university, lost a memory chip from her camera filled with hundreds of “artsy” photos documenting her and her son’s trip through Germany and France, she scoffed at someone’s suggestion that she could replace them. “Someone said I could just collect some pictures off the Internet or gather some pictures of those who accompanied me on the trip. But, bottom line: they are someone else’s memories. Not mine.”
Those who replace lost objects may find that does little to resolve a sentimental loss or to repair negative images of self derived from losing something, especially when their competency is already suspect. When JP, a 28-year-old aspiring comedian living in Boston, lost his cell phone, he had difficulty finding the humor in the situation. Having recently told his disapproving family that he was going to pursue a career in comedy, he felt that telling them he had lost his only means of communication seemed like “evidence that I was not in fact a creative person trying to pursue a dream, but an immature fuck-up with delusions of grandeur who couldn’t keep things in his pocket.” Several days after the loss, JP checked a few more places and began considering a replacement. What he found most disturbing was the damage to his sense of credibility. “It seems really strange to me, because at the same time I recognize how inconsequential [the loss] is. I can buy a new phone, probably a nicer one, and try to keep in mind that one piece of plastic and circuits is easily replaced by another. But there’s a nagging feeling that by losing the phone, the status symbol, the lifeline, that I’ve somehow taken a step backwards from being a responsible adult.”
Chloe, a former corporate analyst in Manhattan, also knows that a replacement will not repair the damage caused by a loss that signals incompetence. She had just moved to Maui to “take a break from my high-pressure work history” when she lost her new employers’ keys. She had presented herself to them as a highly skilled organizer who had “a reputation for knowing where things are, why they are there, and where they will go next . . . and for being supremely qualified not only to keep track of things, but to determine if they are really needed to begin with.” When she had to contact her employers while they were away and enlist their help in finding spare keys or replacing them, she felt humiliated about messing up the very task that she claimed was her strong suit. Soon Chloe deduced why the mishap had occurred and concluded that the problem could be resolved only by quitting her job.
Let me tell you, I felt bitch-slapped by the great goddess Karma. I don’t know what offended her more, my arrogance about how far beneath me this job is, or my lack of concern about honesty in the reporting of my work hours. But either way, I was severely reprimanded. Therefore, this story has not one but two morals, and both are horribly clichéd. Any job worth doing is worth doing well, and honesty is the best policy. Did I take these morals to heart? Well, in a manner of speaking. As far as the honesty goes, I shorted my hours for the second week to make up for what I had overcharged the first week. With regard to the “any job” moral, I decided that this was not a job worth doing, and gave my notice well in advance of my actual date of resignation, so as not to leave them in the lurch. And immediately felt better about the entire situation.
Under circumstances like those JP and Chloe encountered, replacing the lost object cannot repair the damage caused by the loss.
For others, replacement soothes a glaring absence or restores a taken-for-granted and comforting intertwining of self with thing. When Gina, an executive of a Fortune 500 company living in New York City, lost her ankle bracelet while “drinking and gallivanting across the city,” feeling its absence stirred her from sleep and irked her for the next five days. “It was strange getting dressed . . . putting on my shoes especially, without the anklet there. . . . I hardly ever really noticed it, but suddenly my ankle felt very naked without it. Its absence was so obvious. At the jewelry store where my parents bought the original gift I bought a replacement . . . five days after it disappeared, which at least got rid of that naked ankle feeling and gave me something to fidget with in all the odd ways I had never consciously realized.”
Replacing a lost object works only when the replacement does not act as a reminder of the loss. Ryan, a 21-year-old college student living in Minnesota, lost his much-loved jacket. “Two days later, after giving up hope of finding the jacket, I ordered the exact same $150 jacket from Cabela’s, even though it was going to be a stress on my finances, because I knew that I enjoyed that jacket so much that if I were to get another of less quality and value I would always think of the one that I lost and how much better it was.” Individuals may move toward closure if the replacement puts the lost item in a less attractive light, however. When Marcy, a 51-year-old pediatrician living in New York City, begrudgingly began the process of replacing her lost camera, she found its loss much easier to accept. “I learned that it was an old model and was shown the new lighter, higher-pixel replacement. Funny that the camera I had loved which took amazing pictures in sunlight now seemed a bit obsolete!”
Conclusion
Despite the uniqueness of individuals’ responses to losing personal belongings, people always move on by overcoming recurring challenges that are intrinsic to the path they take. Sometimes moving on entails pacifying unsettling feelings or sidestepping them altogether. If and when these feelings develop, they do so by portraying the self in a deficient light, leaving individuals to revive a sense of an adequate self. But what it takes to get them back to a more settled place is often not entirely known by individuals at the outset. Every loss presents itself as a kind of riddle through which losing parties come to see, through subsequent steps and even stumblings, a route for getting back to life as usual.
When first realizing a loss, individuals feel or logically deduce whether they must embark on a recovery effort or can calmly put their concerns aside and back away. When they choose to invest effort in searching, they may learn that success is not enough to enable them to move on. The reemergence of the thing must be pacifying, not a damning commentary on self. Yet counterintuitively, failure to recover the object may provide an escape from the burdens of loss, provided that individuals feel they have made a genuine effort. When all else fails, replacement solves the practical deficits created by the object’s sudden absence, but leaves one in the lurch when its powers derive from its provenance.
Each way of moving on constitutes a different way of imagining the relationship of self and thing. Moving on without the thing, whether by sidestepping a sense of loss entirely or through a failed search, becomes an effort to disassociate self from thing and reimagine an adequate life despite its absence. Moving on with the successfully recovered thing becomes an effort to ignore or disarm the continued existence of troubling forces that could cause the loss once again. Moving on with a replacement becomes an effort to lose oneself once again in the thing while pacifying a sense that the connection is artificial. To move on from a breach in one’s taken-for-granted grounding in the material environment is to play with a notion of where the self ends and the world begins.
Footnotes
I thank Jack Katz, Eli Anderson, Noriko Milman, Bob Emerson, and the Yale ethnography group for their support and useful criticisms of a previous draft.