When Jack Cheng teaches his son not to throw toys, he says, “When you throw choo choo, choo choo has an ouchie. Then choo choo feels sad.” 

In a literal sense, the toy train doesn’t “have” consciousness, the same way that a Word document or AI doesn’t have consciousness. But Jack asks:

Wouldn’t our world be better if we did indeed see Word documents as conscious? Would we be more considerate writers and readers, knowing that each composition was bringing beings into being, and give them proper funerals when we were through with them? Would slide decks be less tedious and superfluous if we knew that each Powerpoint presentation was awake, and each chart and table nested within was happiest when able to present its information honestly?

Think of how different you’d behave if you treated your objects as a child might treat their valued toys. Instead of buying a new pen each time it ran out of ink, you might find ways to refill the pen. Instead of tossing away a weathered jacket, you might be interested in repairing it. If you’re a writer, instead of wondering what your writing can do for you, maybe you wonder what you can give the writing. For me, each blog post isn’t livestock; it’s a pet (perhaps a cold-blooded one).

It reminds me of a passage Meghan O’Gieblyn writes in God, Human, Animal, Machine:

Japan, it has often been said, is a culture that has never been disenchanted. Shintoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism make no distinction between mind and matter, and so many of the objects deemed inanimate in the West are considered alive in some sense. Japanese seamstresses have long performed funerals for their dull needles, sticking them, when they are no longer usable, into blocks of tofu and setting them afloat on a river. Fishermen once performed a similar ritual for their hooks. Even today, when a long-used object is broken, it is often taken to a temple or a shrine to receive the kuyō, the purification rite given at funerals. In Tokyo one can find stone monuments marking the mass graves of folding fans, eyeglasses, and the broken strings of musical instruments.

It’s an interesting relational prompt, not unlike treating your own stress as if it was a pet dog.

The meme that people can be considered the equivalent of non-player characters (NPCs)—when, from a matter of perspective, everyone is the main character in their own story—suggests that we don’t keep in mind that other people also have consciousness.

So this perspective could be useful not only for taking better care of your stuff, but also developing more fulfilling relationships generally.

P.S., A quote from Sherry Turkle’s The Empathy Diaries comes to mind, “To be good at a job, you had to love the objects associated with that job.”