Everything today moves too fast. Photos appear, vanish, reappear somewhere else. Conversations dissolve into notifications. Music doesn’t live on shelves anymore — it streams through the air, without a trace. Our lives are lighter, freer, and yet strangely hollow. Somewhere between updates and uploads, we have lost the feeling of holding time in our hands.
Psychologists remind us that memory is not just something the brain stores; it lives in our bodies, our gestures, and the things we touch. A letter written years ago, a ring, a faded photograph — these are more than objects. They are time made solid. When we touch them, something inside us stirs; we don’t just recall a moment, we return to it.
The warmth of paper, the worn edge of fabric, the way light falls on old glass — all these sensations reactivate memories that would otherwise remain silent. Neuroscience calls this embodied memory, but it feels simpler and more human than that: the world remembers us through things.
Unlike digital images, objects grow old with us. They scar, fade, and soften. They carry traces of those who have touched them before. A crack on a cup, a fingerprint on a photo — each imperfection is a mark of time refusing to disappear. Psychologists have found that people form stronger emotional bonds with physical keepsakes precisely because they show their age.
Objects, in their stillness, do something remarkable: they pause time. In a world obsessed with the next thing, they let us stay with the last.
Philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes that we’ve moved from the “age of objects” to the “age of information.” We no longer inhabit the Earth, he says, but Google Earth. The physical world — heavy, slow, imperfect — is giving way to one of instant communication and infinite replacement. Nothing resists us anymore; everything yields to the touch of a screen.
But when nothing resists, nothing lasts. The digital world erases texture — not only from materials, but from time itself. Each moment replaces the previous one before we’ve even had the chance to feel it.
Touch is our most ancient way of knowing. It roots us in the present. When we hold something — a shell, a coin, a page — our senses awaken, and with them, memory itself. The body becomes an archive. Studies show that tactile experience strengthens emotional recall and a sense of continuity over time.
Maybe that’s why keeping things still matters. A keepsake, a book, a photo in a frame — they slow the endless scroll. They invite us to linger, to breathe, to remember.
To keep an object is not to cling to the past — it is to refuse the speed of forgetting. Every tangible thing is a small time machine, quietly waiting to bring us back to ourselves.
Digital life gives us immediacy. Physical things give us duration.
And sometimes, to truly live, we need something that doesn’t move at all.
Inspired by contemporary psychology of memory and the philosophy of Byung-Chul Han (Undinge, 2021), with supporting research by Ferraro et al. (2020) and Xiao et al. (2023).
