memes

I understand the connections well enough and I could make them on my own if I saw a purpose to it, such as narrative storytelling or choosing them as representative props.

This is my point "if I saw a purpose" means that you would miss any purposes that would only be evident when the act was complete.

Someone seeing a banal object, devoid of story and history and just merely existing,

There is no object in existence that is devoid of story and history. Everything came from somewhere whether by nature or human intervention.

and then succumbing to emotions

What is the negative outcome of "succumbing to emotions" from your beaker example? What cost is paid? What energy lost that would have been expending elsewhere?

over loose connections to human characteristics is what I don’t relate to. A cigar without narrative purpose is just a cigar.

Just your suggestion of a cigar triggers in me dozens of different threads of thought. Here's just a few:

• agricultural - Tobacco was planted and cultivate, harvested then dried and processed. Tobacco can only be grown in certain places in the world. The cigar itself may have been wrapped by hand.
• health - Tobacco has many of the obvious negative health aspects, but a bit fewer with cigars than other tobacco consumption methods
• visceral - Cigar smoke does not smell good to me. Its a pungent and then stale. Something to be avoided. Watching smoke rise is fascinating as it drifts with air currents in the room. Cigars weigh much less than I would expect from how they look.
• cultural - Some modern cultures have a high integration with cigars, and even some like Cuba, have a national identity surrounding them. In the west they were, at one time, an expected gift for the announcement of a new birth.
• historical - Growing tobacco massively changed the world a few times in history, and lead to the enslavement of people in some cases/regions.

The whole thought process that produced that entire list happened to me automatically and was started and ended in less than one second. To me, when someone mentions a cigar any of these things could include additional communications cues to the person or their purpose. Its non-verbal subtext.

I deal with these is recognizing the message when they are used or abused.

I think you may be missing messages.