Hey, whatever heuristic works for helping people show and feel respect for their environment and the things in it is good in my book. If you’re capable of respecting others in your space without needing to be polite to your inanimate tools, then good on you. Not everyone is like that and if it helps someone feel peace with their surroundings to imagine everything around them has some kind of soul or feelings worthy of consideration, then I’ll take that, too.

Of course, there are limits to everything and if a tool irreparably breaks, hopefully someone is able to discard it accordingly. Pathological hoarding of useless objects is a thing, too, after all.