My parents’ first microwave oven lasted more than 25 years. I’ve purchased three in a half dozen years.
Power tools are little different. Same for yard appliances and the many other gadgets that clutter our homes.
We complain that our appliances and tools don’t last like before. That they break after only a handful of years. That even if fixing them were possible, repair shops are gone, swept away like the woolly mammoths by the relentless march of human cultures.
Replacement is the only option – a boon, we say, to every player in the whole consumer game except, of course, actual consumers. Planned obsolescence in the service of greed. Cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching.
Yet our whining overlooks the original obsolescence machines: living creatures, including ourselves. Like our toasters, we wear down, break down and leave, always sooner than we’d like.
’Tis so however we may frame the origin and purpose of life – as divinely conceived and created, or as the accidental result of fortuitous chemical reactions and unguided yet opportunistic evolution.
Our obsolescence is planned, too. Replacement is not an option.
