Heirlooms are like a living thing.

They are not just the object, they are the story behind the object.

If the story dies it becomes just an object.

The story requires humans to transmit it and give it significance: a carrier.

The story can be documented in writing and persist, but with no one to read the story and find it significant and worthwhile, then it is dormant, very unlikely to ever awake again.

Not too dissimilar from code: every time a bit of code is executed, it's a vote from the executor that it matters and should continue to exist.

The Pixar movie Coco also makes this theme an explicit plot point.

The longer the streak of keeping the story alive, the more pressure the current carrier of the story feels to transmit it into the future.

However, a countervailing force is the farther they are from the original events, the less meaning it might have for them personally.

If anyone drops the hacky sack, the game is over.