Thread: object empathy

I think engineers of all people may have felt this:

The feeling of discomfort when a flowerpot is placed upon a shelf, and one senses uneven grit beneath the pot. A compulsive feeling that perhaps by gently shifting the pot it would seat better. That's one obvious example. More insidiously, I've felt this even with a pencil on a desk - it's like I sometimes want to give the pencil a nudge to align the ..um, nap... of its molecules where they touch the desk surface. On the plus side I'm not the sort who'd strip a screw head, because I feel weakness in the metal before that would happen.

I'm curious to learn how others extend empathy to material things. Does it sometimes go too far?

I occasionally line up pencils on my desk and they remain like that for maybe eight seconds when they rejoin the general clutter. The garden shed is a similar mess. Plant pots akimbo. That was to make room for bikes. Seems I have empathy for bicycles, not for plant pots.