I wonder what caused it? was it stuff all of a sudden becoming cheaper than places to put it? was it wisdom passed down from parents who experienced the great depression. an ideological commitment to assigning moral worth to wealth and by extension material possessions?
Some of it was their parents having lived thrush the great depression and lost out on having much of anything and wished their grandparents would have kept stuff just in case. So our boomer parents were taught how important hoarding was.
I think it may be more that they were the first generation to really be targeted by a disposability culture. The world they were born in was such that tv repair was a job and it was expected that if your small appliances broke you’d fix them rather than assuming it’s just not financially worth it. And their great grandparents had lived in a world where middle class people may have a few nice things that were hand crafted and meant to be passed down in a sort of poor person’s version of wealth.
So as mass production and upward mobility skyrocketed in the 20th century, it makes perfect sense that the generation born in the middle of it would not really get that the fact that their parents and grandparents had boxes of “valuable stuff worth a fortune” despite never actually having a fortune or anything close to it means they didn’t, they just had mass produced imitations of what once had been reserved for the wealthy.
Today all items are disposable because consumer goods are either too cheaply made to last a long time (furniture) or too complex or hostilly made to be able to efficiently repair compared to the labor and materials to make a new one (electronics)
I feel like it wouldn’t even be hard to make small appliances or even major appliances that were designed with repairability first, we just need somebody to hurry up and design such a thing and get the parts manufactured
I wonder what caused it? was it stuff all of a sudden becoming cheaper than places to put it? was it wisdom passed down from parents who experienced the great depression. an ideological commitment to assigning moral worth to wealth and by extension material possessions?
Some of it was their parents having lived thrush the great depression and lost out on having much of anything and wished their grandparents would have kept stuff just in case. So our boomer parents were taught how important hoarding was.
I think it may be more that they were the first generation to really be targeted by a disposability culture. The world they were born in was such that tv repair was a job and it was expected that if your small appliances broke you’d fix them rather than assuming it’s just not financially worth it. And their great grandparents had lived in a world where middle class people may have a few nice things that were hand crafted and meant to be passed down in a sort of poor person’s version of wealth.
So as mass production and upward mobility skyrocketed in the 20th century, it makes perfect sense that the generation born in the middle of it would not really get that the fact that their parents and grandparents had boxes of “valuable stuff worth a fortune” despite never actually having a fortune or anything close to it means they didn’t, they just had mass produced imitations of what once had been reserved for the wealthy.
Today all items are disposable because consumer goods are either too cheaply made to last a long time (furniture) or too complex or hostilly made to be able to efficiently repair compared to the labor and materials to make a new one (electronics)
I feel like it wouldn’t even be hard to make small appliances or even major appliances that were designed with repairability first, we just need somebody to hurry up and design such a thing and get the parts manufactured
Annnnnd the corporation was bought for a ton of money to eliminate the competition
Their parents grew up during the Great Depression, so they learned a lot of that stuff from them. Probably
https://web.archive.org/web/20220124075045/https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/08/pandemic-american-shoppers-nightmare/619650/
You might like this. There’s a relevant book mentioned too.