Martin likes to listen to music properly. Not as something floating around in the background while he does three other things. He sits on the couch and listens. Sometimes he streams a concert from his mobile phone to the television. Sometimes it is a DVD. The VCR is still connected too, although videos do not get much work these days. CDs remain in service. So do vinyl records.

And because Martin likes music at something close to the volume at which it was meant to be played, there are headphones. Wired or Bluetooth, but mostly wired.

It all sounds perfectly normal.

Which is exactly the problem.

Take one thing away.

Remove the CD and Martin simply reaches for the vinyl record. Remove streaming and things become less convenient, but the music survives. In the car, you can keep travelling backwards through technology until you reach the cassette.

Then remove the headphones.

Now the neighbours are involved.

Martin has sound-sensitive neighbours. They once noticed the squeak of his doors, something he himself had stopped registering. The doors had not become quieter. He had simply become used to them.

It is a small thing, but it points towards something much larger. Things that remain unchanged for long enough eventually disappear from our attention.

So we started dismantling Martin’s music.

Headphones. Loudspeakers. Amplifier. Turntable. Cassette deck. CD player. Television. Mobile phone. Electrical socket. Plug. Wires. Electricity itself.

“Oh wow,” was Martin’s reaction as the list grew.

The three or four minutes of a song suddenly contained an extraordinary amount of human ingenuity.

Without electricity, of course, most of it stops. Manfred, an electrician, had an appropriate version of history ready.

“When God said, let there be light, we had already laid the cables.”

In Manfred’s telling, electricians have been around for a very long time.

Yet when Martin sits on his couch and presses play, he does not think about cables. He listens to the music. Nor does he particularly want to hear the construction of the guitar, the manufacture of the amplifier or every process that brought the sound into his room.

That would probably destroy the experience rather than improve it.

The machinery needs to disappear.

Until it doesn’t work.

Take away the road signs.

Manfred’s caravan offered another experiment.

What does he need before leaving on holiday?

“A destination. The car has to be roadworthy, the caravan, both through the MOT. I need vacation and my wife.”

A strong start.

Then we removed the SatNav.

No great problem. Manfred belongs to the generation that can still read a paper map. He knows that north is at the top, and losing the electronic voice on the dashboard would not stop him setting off. He knows the general direction. He can reach the German border.

He knows that north is at the top, and losing the electronic voice on the dashboard would not stop him setting off.

So we removed the road signs too.

“That could get interesting.”

Without signs, the landscape itself begins to matter. Head south for long enough and large mountains ought eventually to appear. Those would be the Alps. Continue further and, sooner or later, there should be a sea. Go north and another sea waits at the end.

East is more troublesome.

And even on a familiar journey, knowing roughly where Würzburg lies is not quite the same as knowing which road will take you there. Suddenly memory matters. Previous journeys matter. Geography matters. Natural barriers matter. Borders and legal restrictions matter.

A journey that appeared to belong entirely to the traveller starts revealing how many other people have already prepared the way.

Then we took away the campsite.

Manfred could have a field. He could park the caravan. If he started carefully, the battery might last five days. Food could be bought. Nature provides certain possibilities when toilets disappear, although those possibilities come with complications. Washing depends on finding water. The caravan itself needs electricity for systems that normally require no thought at all.

Could he manage?

Probably.

For perhaps a week.

“Somehow it would work, but it wouldn’t be a holiday.”

That was the point at which the caravan stopped being simply a self-contained symbol of freedom.

Manfred does not need luxury. A field and a water point will take him surprisingly far. But even his version of independence rests on infrastructure.

“The freedom stops when the infrastructure is non-existent.”

The invisible bit underneath.

Once we started looking, the same pattern appeared everywhere.

At work, there are tools and technical systems. The internet has become so fundamental that, as Manfred put it, sad as it may be, almost nothing works without it.

At the end of the month, money appears in an account. We call it being paid. It feels automatic.

It isn’t.

Somewhere there is a system, and somewhere a person has to make that system do what it is supposed to do.

A train door opens. A train door closes. The passenger thinks about getting off at the right station. Almost nobody thinks about the people whose work made that ordinary little movement possible.

And that is probably as it should be.

If every time a train door opened we had to contemplate the engineering, manufacturing, maintenance, software, electricity and human labour behind it, we would never get anywhere.

Successful systems become invisible.

Perhaps that is part of the definition of success.

The unusual becomes ordinary remarkably quickly.

Water comes from the tap.

Electricity comes from the socket.

Really?

Just that?

We know perfectly well that the answer is no. But in daily life, that is exactly how we behave. The water comes from the tap because that is what water does.

Until one morning it doesn’t.

The part that cannot be manufactured.

Martin and Manfred had begun with equipment, but the conversation did not stay there.

Martin had recently celebrated his birthday. There had been good conversations, two excellent cakes and, later, some good concerts to close the day. One of the cakes even travelled home with him.

The technology could deliver the concert. It could not manufacture the good day.

The same is true of music itself.

Suppose every technical component works perfectly. The amplifier works, the headphones work, the electricity flows, the correct signal reaches the correct machine—and the music gives Martin no pleasure.

What has failed?

“Probably me, because I selected the wrong music for the moment.”

Or, he added, perhaps he had put the wrong record into the wrong sleeve.

There are songs, though, where the opposite happens. Martin described Garbage’s The Trick Is to Keep Breathing as a “soul healer”. For him, its message reaches beyond the equipment carrying the sound. In a difficult moment, breathing, relaxing and simply continuing can become the important part.

The equipment delivers the song.

The song does something else.

Manfred found the same distinction in travel. A holiday can contain a flat battery, stress and an unwanted detour. He remembered needing a new battery in the South of France. At the time, the problem was real. Later, it became part of the experience, while the positive memory of the journey remained stronger.

Perhaps that too is something we quietly do all the time. We do not merely remember systems functioning. We remember what they allowed us to feel.

Pleasure.

Relief.

Freedom.

A good conversation.

The feeling that somebody is interested in what we know.

The optimism that can appear when another person seems genuinely willing to move something forward.

Manfred put it simply: the personal attitude of one person can move mountains.

No plug, cable, road sign or SatNav can produce that on command.

What happens when that becomes normal?

A broken SatNav announces itself immediately.

So does a failed internet connection. A silent loudspeaker. A power cut. No water from the tap.

But freedom rarely flashes an error message.

Friendship does not display a warning symbol when we stop noticing it.

Pleasure does not make an alarm sound when it has become routine.

Manfred thought taking those things for granted was not particularly good. There are moments when we stop and recognise that something went well, that a goal was achieved, or that other people helped us get there. But those moments may be rarer than they should be.

Perhaps greater awareness raises the value of the experience.

That does not mean sitting on the couch listening to a song while solemnly thanking the electrical socket, the cable manufacturer and the person who designed the plug. Martin was probably right: if we heard the whole system while listening to the music, we might ruin the music.

Some things need to disappear so that we can enjoy what they make possible.

But perhaps they should not disappear completely.

Because underneath an ordinary song is an astonishing chain of things that work.

Underneath a caravan holiday is an extraordinary network that quietly makes freedom possible.

And underneath both of them is something even easier to overlook.

The fact that we are able to enjoy them at all.

Every home seems to have a place for things that have temporarily escaped a decision.

In Ritesh’s apartment in Bangalore, it is not quite the famous junk drawer. It is a kitchen cabinet. Plastic bags go there, along with containers that arrived with takeaway food, packaging from deliveries and all those small objects that are not useful today but might, under circumstances nobody can yet describe, become useful tomorrow.

“There might be some use in future,” Ritesh said.

That sentence could probably justify half the contents of cupboards, sheds, garages and spare rooms around the world.

Ismar does not have such a place. At least, not officially. If he went carefully through his apartment in Campo Grande, he admitted, he would probably find old clothes he no longer wears. But there is no designated territory for the unnecessary. His home is sparse enough that he does not own a television because he does not watch one, nor a conventional sofa. In six years, he reckons, perhaps three people have visited him.

He does have enough chairs.

“More than people that have visited me in six years,” he pointed out.

So already the mystery was becoming more complicated. One of us keeps containers because they might become useful. Another owns almost nothing he does not need. And yet both grew up in households where throwing something away was very different from what it is today.

Before recycling had a name.

When something broke in Ismar’s childhood home, his father repaired it.

A table leg, a chair, a saddle: these were not automatically objects at the end of their lives. His father could work with the leather from cowhide and make or repair the equipment needed around a farm. He could deal with problems on a tractor. Ismar remembers him as someone who had learned from the environment around him, probably by watching other people and then doing the work himself.

Ritesh recognised the same world immediately.

Growing up in India, he remembers his father and uncle repairing almost everything themselves. Calling someone from outside was not the automatic response. Machinery, tractors and ordinary household problems were dealt with at home when possible. Specialist help existed, but it belonged to the problems that really required it.

The interesting part, to Ritesh, is that the men doing all this had not necessarily been formally trained. They learned because something needed to be done.

He remembers the same attitude towards driving. When a tractor arrived, nobody first disappeared to a driving school. They began in the field, practised and learned. Later, when a car entered the picture, a licence became necessary, but learning still began with doing.

Ritesh sees a difference in himself. In his professional life, he researches first. He learns about a subject and then begins. The previous generation, as he remembers it, often began because there was no alternative.

Some of that knowledge nevertheless travelled with him to Bangalore. When a ceiling fan slows down, for example, he knows that the problem may be a component that can be replaced. He has watched other people call an electrician for work that he remembers being done at home.

For him, this is not simply nostalgia. He wonders whether convenience has weakened the curiosity to ask what has actually gone wrong.

Ismar has encountered the other side of the same change. He once paid roughly half the price of a replacement phone to have his old one repaired. The repair did not last, and eventually he bought another phone anyway. Now his stereo system will no longer play the CDs he likes. He would repair it if he could, but he has struggled to find somebody who will do the work.

He would repair it if he could, but he has struggled to find somebody who will do the work.

The desire to repair has survived. The machinery around that desire has changed.

And perhaps that explains some of the things we keep. A broken object once represented materials, parts and possibilities. Today it can become an awkward object caught between two worlds: too sophisticated for us to repair ourselves, too cheap to justify professional repair, yet somehow too valuable to throw away without hesitation.

When necessity becomes habit.

Ritesh’s childhood gives the phrase “recycling” a rather grand modern sound.

Clothes did not necessarily finish their lives when their first owner outgrew them. Ritesh was the oldest child, so usable clothes could pass down to younger children. When a piece of clothing finally became too worn to wear, it could become a cloth for cleaning the house.

Things moved from one purpose to another.

Fertiliser arrived on the farm in plastic sacks. The sacks themselves could then be stitched together to make something large enough to sit on in the field. Threads removed from them could become rope. That rope could be used around animals or woven into the traditional cot used at home.

Nothing in this required a sustainability campaign.

“I think this habit got developed because of necessity,” Ritesh said.

Money mattered. If something could still be used, using it meant not having to buy something else. But once repeated often enough, necessity became habit. Keeping, repairing and repurposing became normal behaviour rather than an environmental statement.

Some traces remain. At his family home there is still a room into which old things disappear. Ritesh describes needing a torch to investigate it properly. Broken shoes may be there even when nobody could reasonably wear them again.

That is where he draws a distinction. Reuse makes sense to him. Keeping something that cannot realistically be used does not.

Yet the line between those two categories is strangely difficult to locate.

His mother may see one more possible life in an object. Ritesh may see rubbish.

Neither judgement is really about the object itself. It is about what each person has learned an object might still become.

The luxury of throwing something away.

The conversation eventually moved from what we keep to the systems waiting for us when we finally decide not to keep it.

At the Mayor’s home, throwing something away can involve deciding whether it belongs with recycling, food waste or general waste. Even the recycling bin had recently been inspected before collection, with a marker left behind to show that the household was sorting correctly. Larger unwanted objects involve another journey and another sequence of categories.

Ismar’s experience in Campo Grande is very different. He separates recyclable material himself and takes it elsewhere because, as he described it, his apartment complex still does not have the recycling system he believes it should have. He sees recyclable material mixed with ordinary rubbish and contrasts that with more organised collection he has experienced elsewhere in Brazil.

Ritesh described another mixture of systems. In Bangalore, he separates wet and dry waste and sees organised collection around him, although practices vary. Back in his native area, food leftovers may go to animals, while other rubbish may be dealt with very differently. What looks like one national problem from a distance becomes many local realities when seen from the ground.

Perhaps throwing things away is partly a privilege of infrastructure. It is easier to decide that something has reached the end of its life when there is a reliable place for it to go.

Without that, the old instinct returns: keep it. Burn it. Feed it to an animal. Turn it into something else. Put it in the room and decide later.

Living as if you might leave.

Then another explanation for accumulation appeared almost accidentally.

Ritesh and his wife have been building their Bangalore apartment slowly. They have a mattress but have not bought a bed frame. They have chairs but not yet a table. A sofa that could also become a guest bed may come later.

For the moment, they are comfortable.

The apartment feels spacious precisely because it is not full.

Money was part of the original decision, but something else matters too.

“This is not our home,” Ritesh said, meaning not the permanent home they intend to build around themselves over a lifetime. Tomorrow, circumstances may change. They may move. So before buying something, they ask whether they actually need it rather than whether it would make the apartment look more impressive to somebody visiting for a few hours.

Ismar arrived at much the same place through a completely different life.

He has repeatedly moved somewhere expecting the stay to be temporary. He went to Manaus expecting two years and stayed nine. He went to São Paulo expecting two years and stayed sixteen. He expected five years in Curitiba and stayed twelve.

His supposedly temporary homes have a habit of lasting.

Yet the temporary feeling remains.

“I try not to accumulate things,” he said, before immediately correcting the picture a little. He knows he still owns things he could live without.

That may be the most interesting answer to the original mystery.

We keep things because the future is uncertain. Ritesh’s family kept a broken part because one day it might fit another machine. His mother keeps shoes because perhaps an object does not feel completely finished merely because its present purpose is gone.

But uncertainty can work in the opposite direction too. Ritesh and his wife do not want to fill a temporary apartment with possessions they may later have to move. Ismar has spent decades arriving in cities without knowing how long they will remain his home, so accumulation makes little sense.

One kind of uncertainty says: keep it, because you may need it later.

The other says: do not buy it, because you may have to carry it later.

And then there were the Mayor’s three phones.

One works perfectly well, although he does not particularly like it. One is old, cracked and held together by its cover, but still serves occasionally as a small tablet. The third no longer works at all.

Ismar’s solution was admirably clean: remove the personal information, recycle what no longer works and keep the functioning phone.

Ritesh approached the same small mountain of technology differently. Repair what can reasonably be repaired. Use what still meets the need. Trade in or sell what has value. Even a dead phone may contain parts useful to somebody repairing another one.

The Mayor, meanwhile, still had three phones sitting in front of him.

Which may be why the mystery survives.

Sometimes we keep things because we remember a time when objects were difficult to replace. Sometimes because our parents taught us that waste was foolish. Sometimes because an old container, cable, shirt or telephone still appears to have one final useful life hidden inside it.

And sometimes, apparently, we simply put it somewhere and promise ourselves that the decision can wait.

There are certain signs that your children are growing up which are easy to miss. One day you are helping with homework and reminding them not to guess the answers. Another day you find an old video and suddenly realise how tiny they once were.

Babette had one of those moments recently. Her mother had sent her a video from three or four years ago, showing one of the children on a ride. Watching it now, Babette could immediately see the difference.

“She looks so, so mini.”

The child in the old video had not been entirely delighted with the experience. Now things are different. The children are getting older, school is moving forward, and the rides they want to try are getting bigger.

For Babette, that creates a small problem.

She does not particularly like big rides.

When the children become braver than you.

Last year, Babette won two tickets to Europa-Park, and the family visited together for the first time. The park was enormous. Different areas represented European countries, and there was far too much to see and do in a single day.

There was also an immediate difference of opinion about what counted as fun.

One of the children liked the big roller coasters. Babette and another member of the family preferred the smaller attractions.

Then came a ride that mixed a roller coaster with water.

Babette tried it.

“I was screaming very, very loud.”

Her performance was apparently memorable enough that one of the children announced there would be no next roller coaster with Mum.

“Never. Never.”

Babette could laugh about it, but she also knew exactly where her limits were. The park had a Freefall Tower, too. That required considerably less discussion.

She had never tried it.

She never intended to.

“No, no.”

Children, unfortunately, have a habit of becoming more adventurous just as their parents become increasingly aware of gravity.

Three times in a row.

Something else happened at Europa-Park, though, and it began with something very simple: there was almost no queue.

On some attractions, the family waited only about five minutes. At one ride, there was nobody waiting at all. When their first round ended, the person operating the attraction asked whether they wanted to go again.

When their first round ended, the person operating the attraction asked whether they wanted to go again.

Some of the family said yes. One said no.

So they went again.

At the end of the second round, the question came once more: one last ride?

Why not?

By the third round, something had changed.

“I was a little bit brave,” Babette said. “I put my hands in the air.”

It is a wonderfully small definition of bravery. Nothing dramatic happened. Babette did not suddenly decide that Freefall Towers were a good idea, and there was no grand conversion into a roller-coaster enthusiast.

She simply rode the same attraction three times and, somewhere along the way, became comfortable enough to let go.

That probably would not have happened after standing in a queue for an hour.

The art of arriving on the right day.

Queues at a theme park, Babette explained, depend very much on timing.

Outside the school holidays, some days can be surprisingly manageable. During the holidays, it is another story. The park attracts visitors not only from Germany but also from neighbouring countries such as France and Switzerland. When everyone has the same idea at the same time, choosing a quieter weekday does not necessarily save you.

“Whatever day you take, it’s full.”

Friday and Saturday can be particularly busy outside the school holidays, while school groups also appear during the week.

For a family, this changes more than the amount of time spent standing around. Theme parks are expensive. Babette estimated that an adult ticket to Europa-Park costs around €67, with higher prices during the Halloween period. When a day already costs that much before food, transport and everything else are added, spending a large part of it waiting becomes difficult to ignore.

A short queue changes the experience completely. Five minutes means another ride. No queue can mean three.

And sometimes that third ride is the one where your hands finally go into the air.

Growing into the bigger rides.

There is another measurement running quietly through all these family trips: height.

Some attractions have age or height requirements, with Babette remembering 1.20 metres as one of the important numbers. For a child, reaching that mark opens another little piece of the world. Suddenly a ride that once belonged to the bigger children is possible.

Babette is watching those changes happen in other parts of family life too.

The new school year has started, and the coming months matter because another school change lies ahead next year. Homework has become more important. Babette wants the children to work through problems properly rather than simply asking AI for an answer they cannot reproduce later in a test. If necessary, the homework can wait until she has finished work, and then they can sit down and do it together.

There is satisfaction in seeing children become more independent, but something else comes with it.

“On the one side, I’m happy,” Babette said about moving beyond this stage of school. “But on the other side, I’m a little bit sad.”

The babies are growing up.

Perhaps that is why an old video of a very small child on a ride can suddenly matter. You remember the child who was once unsure, compare them with the child now interested in bigger roller coasters, and realise that the change happened while everybody was busy doing ordinary things.

The next project.

Babette has not finished with theme parks.

After the family’s recent holiday in Egypt, she came across a TikTok video showing a hotel in Hurghada with its own theme park. During the day, guests can swim; after dinner, there are rides, including a small roller coaster and a carousel.

Her reaction was immediate.

“Okay, yeah, that’s the next project.”

Not necessarily immediately. The family has also been discussing Turkey or Greece for a future holiday, and Babette is already thinking carefully about flights, transfers, departure times and how much of a holiday can disappear simply through travelling at the wrong time.

But Egypt remains on the list for another year.

Closer to home, there is another funfair coming first. There will be a Ferris wheel and another family outing, with Babette watching children who no longer look quite as small as they did in those old videos.

And perhaps that is the strange thing about growing up: children keep qualifying for bigger rides while parents are still adjusting to the last one.

Babette may never choose the Freefall Tower.

But give her the right ride, a very short queue and three chances, and by the third round, her hands might just be in the air.