An Analysis of Object Symbolism in Contemporary Consumer Culture
Introduction: Objects as Cultural Mirrors
The objects we choose to surround ourselves with are never merely functional. They are laden with meaning, serving as extensions of identity, markers of belonging, and responses to the anxieties of our age. The year 2025 presented a particularly revealing constellation of objects that, when examined collectively, tell a story about who we are becoming in an era of technological disruption, economic uncertainty, and fractured cultural consensus.
From ChatGPT to bag charms, from eggplant installations to engagement rings, each object operates as a symbol within a larger cultural grammar. This analysis examines fifteen objects that captured the public imagination in 2025, decoding what they reveal about contemporary desires, fears, and values.
I. The Anxiety Economy: Objects That Mediate Control
ChatGPT: The Externalized Mind
The fact that ChatGPT has become a verb—joining the rare pantheon of “Google” and “Xerox”—signals something more profound than mere technological adoption. With 18 billion messages sent weekly, this AI chatbot has become what anthropologists might call a “transitional object” for the digital age: a technology we’ve personified to manage our anxiety about information overload and decision fatigue.
Symbolic Function: ChatGPT represents the outsourcing of cognitive labor, but also something deeper—the delegation of uncertainty. Unlike a search engine that presents options, ChatGPT makes decisions, takes stances, provides answers. It is simultaneously a servant (“everyone’s minion”) and an authority figure (“and boss”). This dual positioning reveals our ambivalent relationship with artificial intelligence: we want it to serve us, but we’re increasingly willing to let it think for us.
The personification is telling. We don’t say “search OpenAI’s database”—we say “ask Chat,” as though consulting a wise friend. This linguistic move domesticates the AI, making it feel less like a corporate tool and more like a companion. Yet this familiarity masks a troubling surrender: the abdication of critical thinking to an algorithm we don’t fully understand.
Vending Machines: The Fantasy of Frictionless Living
The explosion of brightly colored vending machines selling fresh food—from dumplings to durians—symbolizes a longing for convenience taken to its logical extreme. These machines promise the quality of human-prepared food without the complications of human interaction.
Symbolic Function: In a post-pandemic world still negotiating social boundaries, vending machines offer a seductive vision: consumption without relationship, service without service workers, commerce without the messiness of human exchange. They are capitalism’s dream object—pure transaction with no labor visible, no tips required, no awkward small talk.
But they also reveal economic anxieties. For businesses struggling with “manpower and rental woes,” these machines represent survival strategy. For consumers, they promise affordability in an expensive city. The vending machine thus becomes a symbol of how economic pressure reshapes social space, replacing human presence with automated efficiency.
II. The Identity Crisis: Objects as Self-Extension
Bag Charms: The Democratized Statement Piece
The explosion of bag charms in 2025—from Labubus to jeweled chains to clip-on beauty products—represents a fascinating shift in how we construct and communicate identity. As the article notes, these accessories became “the de facto way to express identity and personal style.”
Symbolic Function: Bag charms are recession-proof identity markers. In an era when a luxury handbag might be financially out of reach, or when carrying the “same bag at an event” has become socially complicated, charms offer endless variation at accessible price points. They are modular identity: collect, curate, swap, evolve.
But there’s a deeper symbolism at work. The charm-covered bag is a maximalist rejection of minimalism’s austere aesthetic. It’s personal, playful, even childish—a refusal of grown-up seriousness in difficult times. Each charm tells a micro-story: this one from that trip, this character I love, this inside joke with friends. The bag becomes a three-dimensional social media profile, a curated self worn on the shoulder.
The phenomenon also reflects the “cute culture” dominance symbolized by Labubu—a cultural force so powerful that a man in Australia was charged with stealing 43 dolls worth over $7,500. This suggests that “cute” is not frivolous but valuable, not childish but meaningful. In an harsh world, cute becomes armor.
Taylor Swift’s Engagement Ring: The One Ring to Rule Them All
That Taylor Swift’s engagement ring generated “record-breaking searches” and is described as “the one ring that rules over all celebrity engagement rings of 2025” is more than celebrity gossip—it’s a case study in how objects become collective obsessions.
Symbolic Function: The engagement ring has always symbolized commitment, but Swift’s vintage-style “Old Mine Cut diamond” in a “hand-engraved gold band” carries additional layers of meaning. It represents authenticity in an age of mass production, craftsmanship in an era of AI generation, permanence in a culture of disposability.
The Tolkien reference in the article—minus “the death and destruction”—is apt. Swift’s ring becomes a fantasy object for millions, a totem of romantic success in an age of dating app fatigue. It’s aspirational, but safely so: admiring it doesn’t require actually achieving it. The ring allows vicarious participation in a fairy tale ending, a communal dream object for an atomized society.
Emojis and Coded Language: The Secret Handshake
The Netflix series Adolescence exposed how emojis and internet slang—”pill emojis,” “incel,” “red pilled”—function as encrypted communication within subcultures. A father’s confusion about these terms mirrors broader generational and ideological divides.
Symbolic Function: These coded symbols represent the fragmentation of shared language. Where once we had a common vocabulary, we now have tribal dialects. The “pill emoji” doesn’t mean what it depicts; it’s a signifier of ideological position, a test of insider status.
This linguistic splintering reflects deeper anxieties about meaning itself. In an information-saturated environment where traditional authorities are distrusted, subcultures create their own lexicons as boundary markers. To understand the code is to belong; to be confused is to be outside. Objects—even virtual ones like emojis—become shibboleths.
III. The Nostalgia Complex: Objects That Look Backward
Share A Coke: Analog Personalization in the AI Age
Coca-Cola’s revival of its Share A Coke campaign—replacing logos with names like “Lao Ban” or “John”—seems almost quaint in 2025. Yet over 150,000 customized cans were created in the first month alone.
Symbolic Function: This “charmingly low-tech” personalization stands in deliberate contrast to AI-driven customization. It’s mass personalization that feels handmade, algorithmic targeting that feels human. The appeal lies precisely in its limitations—you get one of 170 names, not infinite variation. Scarcity creates meaning.
The campaign also taps into something deeper: the hunger for recognition. To find your name on a Coke can is to be seen, acknowledged, included. In an age of overwhelming choice and endless customization, there’s comfort in predetermined options. Someone else decided these 170 names matter. You don’t have to curate your own identity; you can find it ready-made on a supermarket shelf.
Nintendo Switch 2: The Comfort of Incremental Change
In “a year defined by uncertainty,” the Nintendo Switch 2 became the fastest-selling console of all time despite being “the safest thing that console-maker Nintendo has ever created.” This paradox is instructive.
Symbolic Function: The Switch 2 represents continuity in discontinuous times. It’s not revolutionary but iterative—”a few steady steps forward” rather than a “leap into the future.” This conservative design became a selling point, not a weakness.
The object symbolizes a broader retreat from disruption fatigue. After years of being told everything must be reimagined, consumers gravitated toward the familiar. The Switch 2 says: you already know how this works. No learning curve, no paradigm shift, just more of what you already love. In chaotic times, this predictability is profoundly comforting.
Food Plushies: Nation as Comfort Object
The ubiquity of kaya toast plushies and other local food merchandise in Singapore’s SG60 year reveals how objects mediate national identity, especially during milestone anniversaries.
Symbolic Function: These plushies transform national cuisine into huggable comfort objects. They literalize the phrase “comfort food”—you can now literally cuddle your kaya toast. This infantilization of national identity is both playful and revealing. It suggests a desire to relate to nationhood not through grand narratives but through soft, approachable, non-threatening symbols.
The plushie also domesticates heritage. Instead of intimidating monuments or serious ceremonies, national pride comes in toy form. This reflects a generational shift in how identity is performed: less formal, more whimsical, endlessly shareable on social media.
IV. The Authenticity Paradox: Objects That Signal “Real”
Suzann Victor’s Eggplants: Art as Event
That visitors to the National Gallery Singapore hovered their “noses so close” to rotting eggplants, and that some were stolen, reveals how art objects function in the Instagram age. The eggplants were simultaneously art, photo opportunity, and viral sensation.
Symbolic Function: The eggplants—described as “wall-mounted commentary on drooping, futile masculinity”—operated on multiple levels. As art, they questioned permanence and phallic symbolism. As Instagram content, they were perfect: weird enough to share, conceptual enough to signal sophistication.
The theft of the eggplants is particularly telling. What does it mean to steal rotting vegetables from an art installation? Is it vandalism, art critique, or a desperate bid for authenticity—to possess something “real” in a world of reproductions? The eggplants became more valuable as stolen objects than as viewed art, their absence more powerful than their presence.
Dumplings and Pizza: The Theater of Authenticity
Both dumplings and pizza saw explosive growth in 2025, but a specific kind: “handmade right before their eyes” with “glass-panelled open kitchens” showcasing production.
Symbolic Function: These transparent kitchens are theater stages for authenticity performance. We don’t just eat dumplings; we watch them being made, verifying their realness. In an age of ultra-processed foods and AI-generated everything, witnessing food creation becomes essential.
This is ritual behavior masquerading as consumer preference. The open kitchen is a trust mechanism, a way of saying: there’s nothing hidden, no tricks, no deception. It’s a response to food anxieties and conspiracy thinking—you can literally see that nothing nefarious is being added.
The multiplication of pizza styles—”every conceivable style”—also reveals something about authenticity in pluralistic societies. There’s no single “authentic” pizza, only authentic versions of different traditions. This multiplication both honors diversity and creates anxiety: which tradition should you choose? The object becomes a referendum on cultural positioning.
V. The Aesthetic Battleground: Objects as Ideological Markers
Jeans: The Politicization of Denim
American Eagle’s “Sydney Sweeney has good jeans” campaign became a flashpoint, “variously labelled Nazi, MAGA… and a slam dunk against woke marketing.” That casual denim could spark such intense culture war reactions reveals how thoroughly objects have been conscripted into ideological battles.
Symbolic Function: The jeans—and specifically the ad’s wordplay between “genes” and “jeans”—touched multiple cultural nerves. The genetics reference evoked eugenics anxieties. The conventionally attractive white woman in traditional femininity evoked both MAGA aesthetics and anti-woke sentiment. The casual denim became a Rorschach test for political tribalism.
This suggests we’ve entered an era where no object is ideologically neutral. Everything is interpreted through partisan frameworks. The jeans don’t just clothe; they declare allegiance. The fact that different tribes saw different messages in the same ad reveals how fractured our interpretive communities have become.
Female Celebrity Podcasts: Reclamation as Brand
The explosion of podcasts hosted by famous women—from Monica Lewinsky’s Reclaiming to Meghan Markle’s Confessions of a Female Founder—represents a new genre: the redemption narrative as media property.
Symbolic Function: These podcasts are objects of self-authorship. Women who have been defined by public scandal (Lewinsky), royal drama (Markle), or reality TV (Kardashian) use podcasts to “reclaim” their narratives. The podcast becomes a tool of identity reconstruction.
But it’s also a product. The line between authentic self-expression and personal branding has collapsed entirely. Is Lewinsky reclaiming her story or monetizing her trauma? The answer is both, and that’s the point. In 2025, authenticity and commerce are inseparable. The podcast is simultaneously confessional and commodity, therapy and transaction.
VI. The Global Realignment: Objects That Shift Power
Asian Animation: Cultural Soft Power Made Visible
Chinese film Ne Zha 2 becoming the highest-grossing animated film of all time, earning over $2 billion globally, represents a seismic shift in cultural production and consumption.
Symbolic Function: Animation has long been Hollywood’s domain, but Asia’s “risk-taking” approaches—drawing on deep mythological traditions rather than safe franchises—produced objects that resonated globally. The paintbrush, elixir pot, and sword referenced in the article’s subheading evoke specifically Asian aesthetic and narrative traditions.
This object shift represents geopolitical realignment made tangible. Cultural dominance follows economic power. When a Chinese folk-tale adaptation outperforms Disney, it signals not just market penetration but cultural legitimacy. The object (the film) becomes evidence of a new world order.
VII. Synthesis: What These Objects Tell Us About 2025
Examining these fifteen objects collectively reveals several dominant themes:
1. The Automation Ambivalence From ChatGPT to vending machines, we’re simultaneously embracing automation and mourning what it replaces. Objects that promise frictionless efficiency coexist with objects that showcase human craftsmanship. We want convenience but crave authenticity.
2. The Identity Anxiety Bag charms, coded emojis, customized Coke cans—we’re obsessed with expressing individuality while also seeking belonging. Objects have become prosthetics for uncertain identities, ways to signal who we are when we’re not sure ourselves.
3. The Nostalgia Retreat In an uncertain world, objects that evoke the past (vintage engagement rings, revived marketing campaigns, incremental console upgrades) provide comfort. But this isn’t grandmother’s nostalgia—it’s curated, ironic, self-aware.
4. The Authenticity Hunger Transparent kitchens, stolen art vegetables, celebrity redemption podcasts—we’re desperate for the real in an age of simulation. But we can’t agree on what “real” means, leading to culture war conflicts over objects as mundane as jeans.
5. The Geopolitical Rebalancing Asian cultural products dominating global markets signal shifting power dynamics. Objects carry nations with them.
6. The Cute Insurgency From Labubu to food plushies, “cute” has become a dominant aesthetic mode. This isn’t frivolous—it’s a strategy for navigating difficulty, a softness in hard times.
Conclusion: Reading the World Through Objects
The philosopher Graham Harman argues that objects have an existence independent of human perception, that they withdraw from our attempts to fully know them. Yet we can’t help but read them, project onto them, make them mean.
The objects of 2025 don’t tell a simple story. They reveal contradictions: we want AI to think for us but fear losing autonomy; we seek individual expression but crave communal belonging; we embrace the future but retreat into nostalgia; we globalize while asserting local identity.
Perhaps this is the deepest symbolism these objects offer: they reflect us in our confusion, our contradictions, our attempts to navigate a world changing faster than we can make sense of it. We surround ourselves with things—charms and chatbots, rings and robots, dumplings and dolls—hoping they’ll tell us who we are.
And in a way, they do. Not through any single object, but through the constellation of all we choose to make, buy, cherish, and discuss. The objects of 2025 are a portrait of a culture in transition, uncertain of its values but certain of this: we need things to think with, objects to organize our experience, symbols to make meaning.
We are, as we have always been, symbol-making creatures. The objects we anoint as significant—from eggplants to engagement rings—reveal not just what we value, but what we’re afraid of, what we long for, and who we’re trying to become.
The question is: are we reading these objects, or are they reading us?