There was a period of time, not so long ago, when the vast majority of our daily activities problems were actually pretty well solved. The machines weren’t necessarily the most efficient in materials and energy usage, but they were reliable. And if they broke, most were simple enough to visually break down and understand their functions inherently.

Then, the problem started when companies realized that they were making their stuff too sturdy. There was one legitimate crowd who wanted to cut down on the resource usage. They wanted to bring the devices away from maximization and down to moderation. I agree with that crowd.

Then there were the exploiters. They saw this opportunity and ran with it. The cheaper you can make your product, just to work long enough for you to develop the next model, you could drip-feed your customers garbage year over year.

This went the opposite direction and backfired on the legitimate crowd. Now we use three times as many resources as we once did because they treat everything made for us as expendable. Waste is a good thing to them. The more we throw away the garbage the sooner we replace it.