The Lively Project

What are Your Six?

At some point in our lives, most of us have talked about the objects we would save if our house were on fire. What would we try to hold onto if everything else were lost? It's a useful thought experiment for clarifying what matters to us right now.

But here's a more thoughtful question to consider. Which of your possessions will still matter to you in your eighties? In your nineties?

I am not asking which items will retain their financial value or which ones signal status or success. I am asking which objects tell the truest story of who you are and the life you've lived?

That question sits at the heart of The Lively Project, a research initiative launched in 2016 by gerontologist Gemma Carney at Queen’s University Belfast. The project used material culture, the study of physical objects, to explore how people understand who they are and what truly matters over the course of a life.

The Penelope Lively Framework

The inspiration for this work came from novelist Penelope Lively's 2013 memoir Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time. In the final chapter, Lively chose six possessions that, in her words, "articulate something of who I am." These weren't her most expensive or most beautiful things. As she noted, they wouldn't necessarily sell at a “car boot sale,” a line that made my whole heart smile. 

Her six objects included:

• Two duck-shaped kettle holders from Maine.

• Two ammonites picked up on a Dorset beach.

• A fragment of pottery shaped like a leaping fish.

• A Jerusalem Bible.

• An eighteenth-century embroidery sampler.

• A porcelain cat.

What made her objects meaningful wasn’t their value. It was their resonance. Each one carried a story. Together, they reflected relationships, places, memory, and the passage of time. As Lively observed, these objects “oddly identified” her life.

They illustrated a simple truth: people’s possessions speak of them.

Six People, Thirty-Six Objects

Carney assembled an interdisciplinary team that included two gerontologists from the ARK Ageing Programme, a historian, an arts coordinator, and visual artist Gemma Hodge. Together, they invited six volunteers between the ages of sixty-one and eighty to participate in an exercise based on Penelope Lively's framework.

Each participant selected six objects that offered insight into their life. They sat for interviews in which they explained their choices, and then worked with Hodge to explore the meaning of those objects on a personal level and within a broader social and cultural context. 

What emerged from the process surprised everyone. 

What They Chose

As Carney describes it, the big reveal was simple. No one selected an object of particular financial value. 

• There were no diamond rings. 

• No heirloom jewelry.

• No objects of intrinsic financial value.

Instead, 

There was a teddy bear whose face had been chewed off by a dog thirty years earlier. It was still deeply cherished. When asked why, the owner simply explained, “It was the only toy I had.”

Two of the three men selected mechanical objects, including a spare car part and a three-foot saw. They mourned the loss of repair culture and the rise of built-in obsolescence. In their opinion, when we discard old things, we also discard the expertise and knowledge needed to repair what we own. They did not want future generations to lose pride in maintaining their belongings.

One man, who had spent thirty years in the merchant navy, chose a Morse key, the device once used to send messages from ship to shore. Although the technology is now obsolete, it represented something he wanted remembered. Today’s smartphones grew out of the same radio signaling principles he had mastered decades earlier. For him, smartphone technology did not feel new. It felt like a continuation of knowledge he already understood, rebuilt with different materials at a different time.

Other objects included family photographs and the belongings of loved ones who had died. They told stories of survival, love, and the unexpected ways life can turn out well.

Together, the objects revealed lives lived fully: solo motorbike expeditions across North Africa, hundreds of children influenced through teaching careers, and political statements made through yarnbombing. These were people who might be judged today solely on how they look, without consideration for the depth of experience they carried.

The Exhibition: "Something of Who I Am"

The project culminated in an exhibition at the Crescent Arts Centre. Titled “Something of Who I Am,” it presented all thirty-six objects alongside quotations from participants and from Penelope Lively. Carney described the exhibition as both exciting and deeply moving.

It challenged visitors to consider their future older selves and reflect on how they arrived at this point in life, whether through medical intervention or something as simple as the freedom a bicycle provides. The exhibition framed longevity not as the number of years lived, but as the depth, quality, and richness of a life well lived.

What the Project Revealed

Carney’s research concluded that objects offer “a useful and tangible way to express the complexity of longevity.” 

Across the project, a clear pattern emerged. The objects that mattered most were those that connected people to places, relationships, purpose, and moments of understanding. These were the items tied to feelings of happiness, love, grounding, and usefulness to others. They reflected belonging and a clear sense of one’s place in the world.

The exhibition, Something of Who I Am, invited visitors to consider their future older selves. Not as diminished versions of who they are today, but as people who have gained depth through time and experience.

This is material culture used for longevity research. Rather than tracking biomarkers or optimizing protocols, the project focused on what actually builds over a life well lived. It captured something gerontology often overlooks. Aging is not only biological change. It is the steady accumulation of meaning over time.

As one researcher reflected, “there is something reassuring about knowing that as you grow older, you will know what truly matters.”

What Are Your Six?

If you're optimizing for longevity by managing your biological age, tracking your health metrics, and investing in your cognitive reserve, you're already thinking strategically about time. But are you considering what all that time is for?

Which six objects come to mind for you right now?

Not the most expensive things you own. Not the things that signal success to others. But the objects that, if you were narrating your life through possessions, would tell the truest story of who you are.

Consider:

• What connects you to people who matter?

• What represents places where you felt most yourself?

• What reminds you of moments when you understood something important?

• What tells the story of challenges you've navigated?

• What captures joy, love, or belonging?

• What represents knowledge you've mastered or expertise you've developed?

You don't need to write anything down. Just notice what comes to mind.

This exercise isn't nostalgic. It's diagnostic. Your six objects reveal what you're actually optimizing for beneath all the longevity protocols.

They show whether you're building a life worth extending or simply extending life itself.

The participants in Carney's project didn't choose objects that symbolized wealth accumulation or status achievement. They chose connection, mastery, memory, and meaning. They chose evidence of lives lived intentionally, with purpose and presence.

That's the work. Not just preserving function, but understanding what you're preserving it to do, to hold, to keep.

Because at the end of all the protocols and metrics and optimization, the question remains: What will you want to hold onto? What will tell the story you want to have lived?

If you know what matters, if you've spent your life accumulating connections rather than credentials, meaning rather than metrics, you won't need anyone else to validate your worth.

You'll know what your six objects are. And that knowledge is the ultimate form of longevity planning.

References

ARK Ageing Programme. (2016). The Lively Project – Material objects on the journey of life. Queen's University Belfast. About the Lively Project – The Lively Project

Carney, G. (2016, December 26). What will all the 'stuff' you own mean when you're older? The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/what-will-all-the-stuff-you-own-mean-when-youre-older-69585

Carney, G. (2016). The Lively Project: Using material objects to communicate the lived experience of longevity [Conference paper]. Welcome Trust Pilot Project Arts Workshop, Belfast, United Kingdom. The Lively Project: using material objects to communicate the lived experience of longevity - Queen's University Belfast

Devine, P. (2016, December 13). Look lively: using objects to reflect a long life. Ageing Issues. Look lively: using objects to reflect a long life | Ageing Issues

Hannan, L., Carney, G., Devine, P., & Hodge, G. (2019). 'A View from Old Age': Women's lives as narrated through objects. Life Writing, 16(1), 51-67. Lively_article_FINAL_23_Jan_2018.pdf

Lively, P. (2013). Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time. Penguin Books. Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time - Penelope Lively - Google Books

The Lively Project. (2016). Something of Who I Am [Exhibition]. ARK Ageing Programme, Queen's University Belfast. https://www.ark.ac.uk/ap/lively/