The Uber Lost & Found Index Pays Tribute to America’s Forgetfulness

Uber has released its annual “Lost & Found Index,” a memorial to our collective absentmindedness.

Based solely on this list alone, people only ever seem to leave behind the most eccentric items possible—all the organic and painfully inorganic knickknacks and tchotchkes people use as affectations to set themselves apart in a world of tastes that have become increasingly flattened by algorithms.

The Uber Lost & Found Index Has Been Released

The list is split into subcategories. There’s a top-10 list of the most commonly forgotten items. This is where you’ll find your standard list of leave-behinds—phone, wallet, keys, headphones, and vapes left by forgetful nicotine addicts on the go.

Then Uber splits the list into the 50 most unique lost items. This is where the common person separates themselves from the rest, leaving Uber drivers, and writers like me, to imagine the kind of human life that would leave the specific object behind in a stranger’s car. In the year 2025, people are leaving Ghostbusters ghost traps in the back of some Uber drivers’ Nissan Altima.

They leave mannequins with real human hair behind in a car that someone is probably going to use to pick up their kids from jujitsu class a little later. Women are leaving behind breast milk. Grandmas are leaving behind fine china. Someone left behind an entire urinal. How do you forget that you brought a urinal into someone else’s car?

Someone left behind 15 hookahs, presumably in a mad panic as they were frantically trying to make it to the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the grand opening of their hookah shop.

Someone left behind a unicycle. I’m going to assume they rode the unicycle to the Uber pickup location, then when they got out and started walking around, they were overcome by a distinct feeling that they should be riding a circus vehicle. “Oh, wait. Oh no,” they would say as the dawning horror crept in. But it was too late.

The Uber was ferrying their unicycle onto the horizon.