Ask any senior and they’ll happily tell you that products were built to last back in the day. A vacuum cleaner chugged along for 20 years. Toasters were built like small nuclear reactors, and a washing machine was a generational buy.
That rarely happens anymore. Now we shop with the expectation and acceptance of quick obsolescence. You’ll be lucky to get 5 years out of that washer, and the vacuum cleaner will be coughing and wheezin at 2. In exchange, however, we can get things cheaply. Items are made poorly, and they are sold at a commensurate price. You know you ain’t gonna be passing that $500 sofa down to your kids. These days things don’t have to be good; they just have to be good enough.
“While objects have always been discarded, disposability as a major economic and cultural shift is historically recent, novel and has involved huge transformations in economies, environments, material culture and practices of discarding.2 The invention of the Gillette razor in 1906 is generally seen as the standard bearer of mass-market capitalism and the progenitor of the notion of disposability.3 The Gillette blade was designed to be thrown away when it got blunt. It was an alternative to the straight razor that had to be regularly resharpened and was meant to ‘last a lifetime’. The Gillette blade disrupted an existing practice of reuse, generated new shaving and waste habits, and established the principles of a disposable economy driven by high volume sales of a relatively cheap item designed for limited use, discarding, and then replacement.”
- Professor Gay Hawkins, Western Sydney University
This is not new, but disposability has become the engine of modern economies. And as with so much societal and economic change, tech has been instrumental. Tech taught us to expect obsolescence. In fact, it convinced us that constant churn (labeled “innovation” even if limited to color options or the change in the size of a button) was so critical that we had to pay continual subscription fees to reap the benefits. Instead of buying something once and using it until it was no longer functional, we now buy the same thing every month.
We’re all aware of how perceptions bleed into one another. If the service on a product is poor, customers may think less of the product itself. If you walk into a dirty retail outlet, you’ll eye its products more critically. I don’t believe the influence of living in an era of heightened disposability is limited to consumer goods. I fear it bleeds into other aspects of our lives. When most of our functional items are dispensable, how do we limit the items we see as such? Art, literature, music, peoples’ labor, the institutions on which we rely, the communities in which we live, the norms that govern us—are they all just cheaply convenient, to be jettisoned the moment they intrude on our wishes or whims?
We live awash in disposable stuff that’s just “good enough.” But some things have got to be better, stronger than that. At the very least we need to be able to discern the difference between something that aims for and deserves a place of relative permanence, and that which is designed to be short-lived, quickly discarded, or soon forgotten. Our psyches and our society would probably be the better for it.
Leonce Gaiter – Vice President, Content & Strategy
