While perhaps laughable to some – particularly within the context of home-organizing –, taking seriously the idea that inanimate objects have a life of their own parallels a lot of emerging thought in contemporary philosophy. In particular, the philosophical school of "Object-Oriented Ontology" (OOO) seeks to destabilize the tradition of Western philosophy since at least Kant that relegates the reality of objects to their conforming to the human subject's perception. Graham Harman, whose doctoral dissertation "Tool-Being: Elements in a Theory of Objects" sparked the OOO movement, effectively responds to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger: "Hammers break in different ways from drills, which break in different ways from hearts, kidneys, and lungs. The shocks and surprises generated by failing equipment are not random. The world is not a single lump broken into pieces by consciousness, but consists of individual pieces from the start."

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