Why things used to last longer back in the days

My Bike Keeps Breaking. My Dad Says It’s My Fault. He’s Half Right.

Every few months, my bike breaks. A chain snaps, a gear gives up, or a tyre goes flat for no reason I can find. My dad has a theory about this. When he was young, he says, you bought a bike and it lasted ten years without a single repair. People took care of their things back then.

He doesn’t say the rest out loud, but I hear it anyway: you don’t.

For a while, I believed him. Maybe I’m just careless.

But here’s what I actually do with my bike. I ride it somewhere. I park it. I ride it home. No stunts, no mountain trails, no throwing it down the stairs. If that’s enough to wreck a bike every few months, something else is going on.

I think two things are going on. Only one of them is my fault.

Part one: we stopped treating things like gifts

My dad isn’t wrong. He’s just telling half the story.

Fifty years ago, people owned less. A new bike or a new pair of shoes was an event. You didn’t know when the next one would come, so you looked after the one you had. You cleaned it, fixed it, and oiled the chain on Sunday. People weren’t more virtuous. Losing it simply meant going without.

Today, replacing something costs a click and a few days of waiting. Clothes get bought and never worn. Phones get swapped while the old one still works fine. Nobody cleans their bike after a rainy ride, because why would you? If it dies, there’s another one.

We don’t cherish what we can replace without grief. So yes, Dad, guilty. Partly.

Part two: they’re counting on it

Here’s the half my dad leaves out: the companies making our stuff know all of this. They know exactly how we buy, and they design for it.

This isn’t new. In 1924, the world’s biggest light bulb makers formed a cartel and agreed to cap bulb lifespans at 1,000 hours. Members whose bulbs lasted longer paid fines. Read that again: they fined each other for making better light bulbs.

It hasn’t stopped. In 2020, France fined Apple €25 million for not telling iPhone owners that a software update would slow down older phones with worn batteries. Apple said it was protecting the phones from sudden shutdowns. Maybe so. But nobody asked the people who owned them.

Then there’s the quieter stuff: glued-in batteries, proprietary screws, spare parts that cost almost as much as the product, and “repairs” that turn out to mean replacement.

Not every product is designed to fail. But a company that sells you something that lasts forever only sells to you once. The incentive points in one direction.

Put the two halves together and you get a loop. Things are built to last a little less, so we care for them a little less, so they die a little sooner, so we buy again. Everyone plays along, and the landfill keeps score.

Why I build what I build

This is why ClosedLoop exists.

I don’t think the answer is guilt-tripping people into caring more. I don’t think it’s waiting for manufacturers to grow a conscience either. The answer is to give owners back the thing that got lost: knowing what’s actually happening to their stuff.

My dad’s generation cared for their things because they had to. We can care for ours because, for the first time, we can actually see what’s going on inside them.

That’s the idea behind Tribograph, the first tool I’m building. It shows you what’s actually wearing your Mac out, and what each update does to it. That way you decide when your machine is done, not a software update and not a marketing cycle.

Because the most sustainable device is the one you already own.