At any rate, as you might infer from his inability to locate Pittsburgh, my father was truly hopeless when it came to keeping track of smaller things. His pet name for my mother was Maggie (derived from Margot, her given name and the one used by everyone else), and one of the phrases I heard most often throughout my childhood was “Maggie, have you seen my”: checkbook, eyeglasses, grocery list, jury summons, coffee mug, winter coat, other sock, baseball tickets—several times a day, some new object gone astray completed that question. Without fail, the second half of this call-and-response was “It’s right here, Isaac.” Luckily for my father, my mother generally had seen the missing item and could remember where it was, and failing that, she had the temperament to track it down. In keeping with her superior navigational abilities, my mother was patient, methodical, and highly attuned to her surroundings.
I inherited these traits; my sister, who is now a cognitive scientist at MIT, did not. In this respect, the four of us, otherwise a fairly similar bunch, were always notably divided. On the spectrum of obsessively orderly to sublimely unconcerned with the everyday physical world, my father and sister were—actually, they were nowhere; they were somewhere near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, still looking for the spectrum itself. My mother and I, meanwhile, were busy organizing it by color and size. I have a vivid memory of watching my mom try to adjust an ever-so-slightly askew picture frame—in the Cleveland Museum of Art. My father, by contrast, once spent an entire vacation wearing two different shoes, because he had packed no others and discovered that the ones on his feet didn’t match only when asked to remove them by airport security. My sister’s best air-travel trick involved losing her own laptop, borrowing her partner’s, and then accidentally leaving it at a United Airlines departure gate one week after 9/11, thereby almost shutting down the Oakland airport. She also excels, as my father did before her, at the more understated art of repetitive losing: cellphone, annually; wallet, quarterly; keys, monthly. On the sole occasion in my adult life when I myself lost a wallet, I made the mistake of trying to complain to her about it and she laughed at me. “Call me,” she said, “when they know your name at the DMV.”
As the torchbearer for my maternal lineage, at least in this respect, I have always been naturally inclined to do slightly unnatural things, like organizing the pantry by food group or putting every one of sixty-four crayons back in the exact same slot it was assigned at the factory. That kind of fastidiousness, not to say obsessiveness, can come in handy for keeping track of possessions; one reason I seldom lose things is that I get a little itchy if I haven’t returned them to their designated household location. Well into adulthood, this tendency toward order, combined with two immediate family members who made me look good by comparison, led me to believe that I was not one of those people who lose things.
But pride goeth before a forty-minute search for that piece of paper you were just holding, and the fact is, we are all one of those people who lose things. Like being mortal, being slightly scatterbrained is part of the human condition: we have been losing stuff so routinely for so long that the laws laid down in Leviticus include a stipulation against lying about finding someone else’s lost property. Modernity has only made this problem worse. In the developed world, even people of modest means now live in conditions of historically unfathomable abundance, and every extra item we own is an extra item we can lose. Technology, too, has exacerbated the situation, rendering us chronically distracted while simultaneously supplying us with enormous numbers of additional losable things. That has been true for a while now—the remote control is still one of the most frequently misplaced objects in American households—but as our gadgets grow ever smaller, the odds of losing them grow ever larger. It is difficult to lose a desktop computer, easier to lose a laptop, a snap to lose a cellphone, and nearly impossible not to lose a flash drive. Then there is the issue of passwords, which are to computers what socks are to washing machines.
Phone chargers, umbrellas, earrings, scarves, passports, headphones, musical instruments, Christmas ornaments, the permission slip for your daughter’s field trip, the can of paint you scrupulously set aside three years ago for the touch-up job you knew you’d someday need: the range and quantity of things we lose is staggering. Someone like my father might lose ten times as much stuff as someone like my mother, but on average, according to data from surveys and insurance companies, each of us misplaces roughly nine objects per day—which means that by the time we turn sixty, we will have lost nearly two hundred thousand things. Not all of those losses are irreversible, of course, but one of them always is: the time you wasted searching for all the rest. Across your life span, you’ll spend roughly six solid months looking for missing objects. Here in the United States, that translates to, collectively, some fifty-four million hours spent searching per day. Then there’s the associated loss of money: domestically, around thirty billion dollars a year on lost cellphones alone.
There are two prevailing explanations for why we lose all this stuff—one scientific, the other psychoanalytic, both unsatisfying. According to the scientific account, losing things represents a failure, sometimes of recollection and sometimes of attention: either we can’t retrieve a memory of where we put our missing object or we didn’t encode one in the first place. According to the psychoanalytic account, the opposite is true: losing things represents a success, a clever sabotage of our rational mind by our subliminal desires. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud describes “the unconscious dexterity with which an object is mislaid on account of hidden but powerful motives,” including “the low estimation in which the lost object is held, or of a secret antipathy towards it or towards the person that it came from.” A colleague of his put the matter more plainly: “We never lose what we value highly.”
As explanations go, the scientific one is persuasive but uninteresting. Although it makes clear why we are more likely to misplace things when we’re exhausted or distracted, it sheds no light on how it actually feels to lose something, and it provides only the most abstract and impractical notion of how not to do so. (Focus! And while you’re at it, adjust your genes or your circumstances to improve your memory.) The psychoanalytic account, by contrast, is intriguing, entertaining, and theoretically useful (Freud pointed out how swiftly certain people of his acquaintance found something again “once the motive for its being mislaid had expired”) but, in the majority of cases, unconvincing. The most charitable thing to be said about it is that it wildly overestimates our species: absent subconscious motives, apparently, we would never lose anything at all.
That is patently false—but, like many psychological claims, impossible to actually falsify. Maybe my father lost his baseball tickets because he was disappointed in Cleveland’s chronically lousy performance. Maybe my sister loses her wallet so often due to a deep-seated discomfort with capitalism. Freud would stand by such propositions, and no doubt some losses really are occasioned by unconscious emotion, or at least can be plausibly explained that way after the fact. But experience tells us that such cases are exceptional. The better explanation, most of the time, is simply that life is complicated and minds are limited. We lose things because we are flawed, because we are human, because we have things to lose.
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