The Real Cost of Cheap Things Is Not the Price — It Is Your Expectation
When You Learn to Expect Nothing to Last, You Accidentally Learn to Expect Nothing From People Either
On the subway the other day, my mom was standing there scrolling through her phone. I glanced over — she was looking at shoes.
“Shoes these days,” she said, “they’re cheap, sure, but the quality is nothing like before.” Then she started talking about a pair she’d had for over a decade, still holding up fine.
I told her: “There’s not much you can do about it. The way the system works, things have to be designed this way — if nothing ever wore out, there’d be no new demand, and the whole machine would grind to a halt.”
She might not have followed the macroeconomics of it. But the feeling? We both knew it. Our old water heater has been running for twenty years. Meanwhile, the things we’ve bought since then — three years, five years, and you’re already replacing them. Nobody even finds that strange anymore.
I’ve been preparing for a move lately, so I went to look at water heaters. Sometimes I like to put salespeople on the spot. I said: “Can this one last twenty years? Thirty?” And I told him about our old one.
He smiled. “We offer an eight-year warranty. But whether it’ll make it to twenty years —” He paused. “Some things are hard to say out loud.”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to.
The products being made today aren’t made poorly because they can’t be made well. They’re not allowed to be made too well. Before a product ever leaves the factory, its lifespan has already been quietly shortened — not because the technology isn’t there, but because it can only be built to last so long. There’s a specific term for this: planned obsolescence.
But planned obsolescence is just the surface of it.
Beneath that is something deeper: demand is never natural. It’s manufactured. It’s not that you have a need and someone comes along to fill it — it’s that a product exists first, and then you’re made to feel like you need it. You think you’re satisfying yourself. In reality, you’re feeding a machine. A machine that runs on continuous consumption, continuous desire. Durable goods cut off its fuel supply. So durable goods are not permitted to exist.
This is how the dominant economic logic of our time works. You can’t call it morally good or bad — it’s simply the operating system of the world we live in.
But there’s one thing I think is worth pausing on.
When you’ve already resigned yourself to the fact that something won’t last long before you’ve even bought it. When you consider a pair of socks good value if it survives the season. When, at the moment of purchase, you’ve already quietly anticipated its death —
This isn’t just a shift in consumer habits.
It’s that your expectation of what things are supposed to be has been silently lowered.
And you don’t even feel like something is wrong. Because everyone does this. Because it’s always been this way. Because you’ve long since stopped noticing.
Habits are quiet things. They don’t announce their arrival. They just slowly become the default way you see the world.
Lately, I’ve been sitting with a question: as we grow more and more accustomed to treating things as disposable, does that logic quietly migrate into how we see people?
Is a relationship worth investing in deeply? Is a person worth the effort of truly knowing?
If we’ve already learned to pre-assign an expiration date to our possessions — do we start doing the same with people? Thinking: it’ll run its course anyway, so why go all in, why take it seriously, why expect too much?
I don’t have an answer.
But I think the question is worth asking — while we can still feel it well enough to ask.