Personification

I'm a fan of personification. I like to name my bikes and give them personalities (my current bike, Cielo, is a "fair weather" bicycle who dislikes getting wet). I sometimes, at least jokingly, ascribe agency, favoritism, and/or antagonism to dice. And in a recent conversation with my mom, I described one of our kitchen drawers as being "eager to serve." I like to think of things as being like people, partly because it helps me practice empathy and kindness. If nothing else, it helps me make interesting fictional characters and imaginary friends.

Naturally, it's possible to take this too far, and it's important to recognize where imagination ends and reality begins. It's important to know that inanimate objects can't hear you and that what they do doesn't actually reflect who they are as people, because they're not people, and they don't actually do anything. Still, it's fun to pretend.

But if we personify anything, we should be sure to also personify people. We should acknowledge that everyone we meet (and everyone we don't meet) is a real person with real personalities and feelings that should be respected. All people are worth caring about, whereas most physical things aren't. So, while it's fun and harmless to treat objects like people, we must be careful to never do the reverse. We must never objectify people or treat them as anything less than human. We should treat all people like the people they are.

It's fine to personify objects, and if it helps us practice empathy, it can even be a good thing, just so long as we remember to actually respect the true personhood of people, too.