Personality accessories: objects that define our self

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There are objects with great value for us. They define our personality, our values, and are even capable of weaving a thread with our past. Beyond the mobile phone, there are pieces of clothing, jewelry or watches that can have a great emotional charge.

Personality accessories are those items that make up an extension of our self. Just as as children we had our fetish toys, like that teddy bear that always accompanied us, it is interesting to know that in adulthood, this tends to be repeated. It is enough to inspect what we carry with us right now.

Clothes define our own style and our way of being. We wear jewelry, watches… And, of course, in this present we all carry with us that revered object: the mobile phone. Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman explained that people need accessories that enhance our self-presentation..

Electronic devices are now symbols and expressions of ourselves. They not only contain part of our life. We not only use them to move around the world, interact and work. They also define our status, values and emotional universe.

We are all closer to certain objects that have a very special symbolic meaning for us.

Personality accessories: what are they and what do they represent?

People accumulate a large number of objects throughout their lives. Most of them fulfill their usefulness and pass unnoticed through our home, through our personal spaces, until they are discarded and replaced. Many are retired, but some of them can be part of our lives permanently and almost ad eternalum.

So much so that, sometimes, they even pass from one generation to another, thereby acquiring an emotional imprint of great significance. The object suddenly acquires essence, and said essence is given by the identity given to it by its owner. Personality accessories are those items that project part of who we are, our history, memories, tastes and desires.

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The human being needs these accessories and that connection with the inert, with what is lifeless. They fulfill an instrumental and also symbolic function, and this is something that begins in childhood. Toys are our first socio-emotional objects. It’s more, It has even been discovered that Neanderthals were already creating jewelry more than 130,000 years ago.

They also had the need to create ornaments, pieces that were surely also someone’s personality accessory.

As science tells us, people systematically acquire and abandon objects as our personality or group pressure varies.

We look for items that generate rewards

Sociologist Erving Goffman pointed out in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) that objects reveal information about social subjects; that is, of ourselves. They define our lifestyle, our values and our perspective on the world. Whoever chooses to buy a bamboo toothbrush and not a plastic one reveals, for example, his commitment to the planet.

Personality accessories also give us a series of rewards. They are not only useful to us instrumentally, they also have an emotional and social connotation. Let’s go back to mobile to understand the latter.

Certain brands and models of phones can give us a certain status. In addition, they provide us with countless benefits, just like a computer, or even a car, can do. The more rewards or positive reinforcements that object gives us, the greater the bond we establish with it.

However, and here comes the curious fact, nowadays people acquire and discard these items on a regular basis. The need to consume, the pressure of fashion and planned obsolescence mean that our personality accessories are constantly renewed.

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Personality accessories, our social masks

Stanford University published an article in 2020 on personality accessories. Something interesting that stood out in this work is how certain objects have a previous symbolic meaning that ends up conditioning the perception we have of ourselves. In some way, certain items act as social masks.

Let’s think about our clothes. It is enough to wear a jacket of a certain style to project an image to others. People need those masks, those clothes, those cell phones, cars, jewelry or watches to complement our self.. And this can also change over time according to fashions and needs.

People with hoarding disorder are unable to let go of objects because they feel like they are part of themselves.

The emotional attachment to certain objects, our most precious possessions

There are personality accessories that we do not throw away, that we do not renew and that we do not part with. Some of them have been bequeathed to us by family members. Others came into our lives by chance and tell a story, they are part of us. There are objects with which we build a permanent emotional bond.

No matter how worn out they are or how outdated they are, those items from yesterday fill our present and remind us of who we are or where we come from. And that this is so is good and enriching. After all, people are stories and it is common for us to be accompanied in this existential narrative by books, shoes, watches, dolls and even perfume bottles that stopped smelling a long time ago.

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What is problematic is the inability to discard what is neither useful nor has an emotional component for us.. An example of this is people with an accumulation disorder, who are unable to part with their possessions, regardless of their real value.

Sometimes, our accessories become our worst enemy: we long to own them and other times, we are afraid to abandon them…