CNN —
When she goes to the grocery store, Lilianna Wilde will sometimes go for the shopping cart from which everyone else steers clear, the sad-looking one with the squeaky wheel.
When she puts the dishes away, she’ll swap the bottom plate and put it to the top, so the it can be used.
And when she had to get rid of her favorite pair of jean shorts, the ones she wore for years, she felt bad for the clothing as she folded it to be sent away.
It’s nothing that impacts Wilde’s ability to function, she said, just a fleeting moment of emotion for the object that cannot return the feeling. When Wilde talked about the phenomenon in a video on her TikTok account, where she often posts lifestyle and relationship content, she found that she was not the only one who did it. People commented that they felt emotions for their stuffed animals, plants, furniture and even the voice behind their phone’s GPS.
The brief humanizing of these non-sentient objects could be a part of a person’s natural desire to seek out connections in their everyday lives, said Dr. Melissa Shepard, a board-certified psychiatrist in Maryland.
“We’re sort of hardwired to connect with other people, and sometimes that extends to other (things) who aren’t people,” Shepard said. “We look for ways as humans to make sense of the world, and one of the easiest ways to understand the world is through what your own experiences are.”
It’s nothing to be concerned about unless it is an extreme emotion that interferes with your daily life. Here’s what experts have to say about the curious behavior.
Anthropomorphizing household objects
When people feel sympathy for inanimate objects, they are anthropomorphizing, attributing human behaviors or feelings to animals or objects who cannot feel the same emotions as we do, Shepard said.
The exact reason people do this is unclear, but experts have some guesses. Sometimes, the feelings are attached to objects that a person has had for a while and now finds to be sentimental or nostalgic, reminding them of a different time in their life, said Kim Egel, a licensed marriage and family therapist in California.
“I think we all have things that kind of tug at our hearts a little bit more,” Egel said. “It’s common for humans to do this. … Perhaps just some people might do it more than others for certain reasons.”
It could be a projection of someone’s feelings onto the object, such as giving an object an emotion that they have felt in the past, like loneliness when said object is isolated. Or it could be a sign that a person is not getting the connection that they want and need from humans, she added.
When Wilde first shared the video, she thought she might be the only one who experienced emotions for the unassuming objects, she said.
“My husband, who’s in the video with me, he doesn’t get it at all. He’s like, ‘I don’t understand how you could feel any kind of human feeling toward something that isn’t human or alive,’” Wilde said. “But it’s not at the same level that you feel it for a human, it’s just a comparable emotion.
“It’s not like it affects my day-to-day, like I think about it quickly, that I feel bad for the jean shorts, and then it’s over. … You realize, ‘why am I feeling sad for this? These are, you know, jean shorts,’ and you move on from it.”
She wonders if the feelings could be derived from the movies she loved to watch as a kid, such as Disney’s “Toy Story” saga or “Beauty and the Beast,” which gives life to things that do not have it in the real world. Or maybe it stems from feelings she had as a kid of being left out or not included that she doesn’t want anyone else to feel, she said.
Wilde wonders if anthropomorphizing is more common for people that watched movies like
