Published April 20, 2008
by afdubreu
Saturday's Globe and Mail had an article titled If it's broke, fix it which lists a multitude of items that can be fixed rather than tossed, such as shirts whose collars have become too tight, luggage that needs a new panel or zipper, and purses that need to be relined. The point of the article is that you can help the environment and your wallet by repairing items rather than replacing them. It's a great message, but as is pointed out by the readers in the comment section, this is generally only practical for high quality items. When you buy something cheap, for example from a dollar store, it is normally more expensive to fix it rather than to replace it. And in our consumer society where one always wants the newest and latest thing, buying something that will last 20 years can be a hard sell.
[photopress:story_of_stuff.jpg,full,alignright]Another issue, is that things are simply designed to not last very long. Check out the fabulous The Story of Stuff video with Annie Leonard. This 20 minute look at stuff, from extraction to sale and use, and then disposal, highlights that things are designed to only last long enough for consumers to still have faith in them. This process, which is called planned obsolescence, essentially creates things for the dump - to last a little while, break, and be thrown out, so that the consumer will then go out an buy a new one. Annie also talks about perceived obsolescence, when we throw away things that are perfectly useful. This gets back to the issue of having the latest version of stuff - for example smartphones, such as the BlackBerry Curve, as I discovered recently with some MBA friends who seemed more interested in the "look" of the item, or "beauty" according to the website, rather than its features or "brains".
As Annie points out, all the advertisements that we are bombarded with try to tell us what we should want and have. And then we go out and get these things, otherwise we feel inadequate compared to our peers. So this means that we don't just buy cheap stuff because it is cheap, but we buy it because this is the only way the majority of us can afford to always have the latest thing. All of this reminds me of something somebody once told me: unhappiness is unmet expectations. It seems the root cause of our "stuff problems" is that we compare ourselves to what's happening in popular culture too much, rather than concentrating on what makes us happy. The take away then for me is to always aim to buy things that I really love rather than just what's in style, so that I won't get tired of them. I guess I'd better go get my brown boots fixed now, and walk my talk!
Posted in: Blogs | Shopping the Talk
