The Objects Worth Saving...

Is anything physical really worth holding on to anymore?
[Yes.]

^{Rob Petrozzo, for Rally}

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Some days it’s hard to focus on the future of “things.”

Just existing can be exhausting, so being asked to make judgments about permanence while sprinting down an airport conveyor belt can feel impossible. The trick is making a thin-sliced educated guess on whether a thing will still matter in twenty years. Or ten. Or tomorrow morning. Or twenty minutes from now, in a world thats trained us to treat our own attention span like a golf handicap.

But independent of the calendar days we burn, or the price of the things we own, or sustainability of personal interests, connection certainly still matters and that still takes real time to develop. Markets rise and fall and tastes rotate, and yesterday’s obsession becomes tomorrow’s clutter. But separate from all of that - beneath the spreadsheets and the resale data - theres always a small, irrational bond that forms between a person and an object for reasons that rarely make logical sense.

At some point in growing up, all of us start making things “ours.” These things aren’t investments; they’re landmarks. They mark the borderlines of who you were and who you turned into. I’ve always suspected this is why so many of us held on to empty iPhone boxes. Because that product (a real first of its kind for a whole generation) felt important and expensive, so we felt like we had to keep it “just in case.” It’s honoring a feeling of unboxing that $1,000 thing that was completely unique.

Meanwhile, the culture is perpetually testing a message that gets louder through the media and the AI cycle that works counter to everything we know: “In the future you’ll own nothing, and be happy.” 

Which isn’t a scary sentence until you realize what it’s really saying: Ownership itself is becoming a luxury. They’re telling you that attachment to a thing is inefficient. That the modern ideal is to float through life unburdened by possessions, even if those possessions are the only things carrying our stories.

In my home office there are a few shelves devoted to my personal archaeology - the stories of my “stuff,” if you will (One of them w/ some specific footnotes is below):

They’re filled with old things and new things, pretty things and ridiculous things, many that I’m embarrassed to be showcasing in any way as a middle aged man. I don’t really add stuff or change anything around, because most of it it tokens of Rally’s growth and past lives - all of which are unlikely to ever be made again. They sit there like a tiny private mostly-nonsensical museum, rarely seen by another living soul. I don’t host meetings in my apartment and I’m not even here that much these days, so really I’m the only audience. And that, is exactly the point. 

Some of what lives on those shelves carries significant dollar value. Some of it would be worthless to anyone but me. But I don’t really check the price of any of it. That said, all of it, by my own private and slightly unscientific standard, qualifies as important. These are the objects I’ve decided are worth saving. Lately, as I’ve tried to shrink the borders of what I keep (“hoard” is probably the more honest verb to use) I’ve found it helpful to sort the chaos into three distinct, but equally meaningful, categories:

01: Foundational Objects

These are the things that mattered because they set something else in motion. The humble artifacts that rearranged the trajectory of your life or, as is often the case for me personally, a career. If my shelves were a museum, this category would be the equivalent of a constitutional founding document or a dinosaur fossil - evidence of the earliest chapters of a much longer story. 

You don’t really know where you’re headed until you know where you’ve been, and these objects are physical markers of that journey. They’re proof that beginnings are real, and that progress matters. And if this generation truly does end up living to 100 and beyond, the importance of these pieces will only grow. Time has a way of turning ordinary things into primary source material when the road is long enough.

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02: Expensive Objects

Some of these are things are once-raging emotional fires that have since burned out, but the cash-value is such that you can’t just turn your back on it. Once upon a time I was madly in love with these things, but I would never commit to investing in that same object now at today’s prices. Either at the moment of acquisition or somewhere along the winding roads of ownership, their price crept high enough that a soft but disciplinary voice started whispering “you can’t let this go.” 

In some instances, the “thing” is worth less than you paid for it, so there is definitely an element of sunk-cost fallacy, no question about it. But there’s a useful side to that stubbornness. It acts as a guardrail against the impulse to purge something meaningful just because the current moment feels inconvenient. I didn’t fall out of love with the object itself - it’s just a different season from when I first found it. And what feels unnecessary in the brutal cold of a New York Winter can suddenly feel essential again in Spring. So we hold onto it. Partly out of pride, partly out of memory, and partly out of the simple belief that some relationships, even with inanimate things, deserve a long arc when the underlying value is too great to abandon it. 

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3. Core Memory Objects

These are the genuinely priceless things (even if they’re for sale on eBay).

Linear time has a brutal habit of erasing details - it starts to layer vertically and take on massive weight, compressing whole years into a paper-thin stack of raw-edges. But the moments that fight back and refuse to disappear almost always have an object tethered to them.

In my parents’ house there’s an old Flintstones mug that came from a McDonald’s Happy Meal in 1993. It’s made out of real glass (shocking by today’s trash-standard of quality) shaped to look like it was carved from cartoon rock and bones. I don’t remember the day I got it or the car ride or the meal. But I remember how walking into McDonald’s felt like MAGIC as a kid, and I know how deeply that goofy, prehistoric world seeped into an entire generation. Even now at Rally, we still reference it without thinking twice.

That mug belongs to me, but it also belongs exactly where it is - holding toothbrushes in the bathroom cabinet in the house I grew up in. Objects like that don’t go anywhere. They definitely bring you somewhere though and create a mental stock market of sorts that is perpetually liquid, but has no literal price attached to it. They’re bridges without toll booths.

All of this connects back to a feeling that I’m finding harder to escape each day, which at its base boils down to “I don’t really love the lifeless direction in which this world is headed” (thats a personal opinion, not a corporate one btw). But it also directly connects to what we’re asking ourselves these days at Rally, which is a pretty simple question in an increasingly complex compute-driven existence: 

What’s worth saving?

The categories I’ve been thinking about aren’t just a way of sorting my own shelves. They’re the same categories we think about every day at Rally. They guide what we bring into the app (and the new product we’re launching this summer) along with what we put on display in our physical spaces and what we choose to celebrate beyond the marketplace side of this business. 

Sometime at the start of 2019 we decided that everyone had already built the transactional apps that make investing “easy.” So the only space left with a big enough TAM to make it a business was to make ours meaningful. So now, it’s about deciding, collectively, which pieces of the past, present, and future are worth keeping. Which stories deserve to be preserved. Which objects still have enough gravity to pull us out of the endless scroll and remind us that yesterday was real, today matters, and that the future doesn’t have to be entirely weightless.

Thats the work we’re all doing, in one way or another. Right?

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Until Next Week…