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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

This is such a bad frame of mind if you're someone who owns more than a dorm room of stuff. I used to feel like this about stuff. "Oh it's just $100 and we use it every day, totally okay to replace every few years."

But it adds up when you start having to replace 100 different "it's pretty cheap given how often we use it" items in a year.

And it's not just the cost. It's also the time you commit to being a consumer. Thinking about which one to buy, reading reviews, etc. Some people enjoy being consumers and that's fine. But it takes away from what I want to be doing with my life. I want to buy something once and not have to think about it for a long time.

I don't think people have a frame of reference in their short lives to realize just how much time they spend being consumers and how that doesn't have to be normal.

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> I want to buy something once and not have to think about it for a long time.

A thousand times this ^ And ideally for everything: phone, computer, headphones, clothes, etc.

Personally, I own one pair of pants that I know will last about 2 years before I need to replace them, then just buy exactly the same pair again. Same with t-shirts, except I own about 10 of the same and replace 2 or 3 once a year (each one will last 2-3 years).

Kind of trying something similar. My jeans seem to be tough enough, but I’ve had a hard time with t-shirts. I’m looking for plain t-shirts without logos. What brands do you buy?

For nice t-shirts without logo, check Muji (their bio cotton collection) or Uniqlo (their Supima cotton collection). Less than $15, great fit, good enough durability.

For t-shirts, Banana Republic (although they keep changing the styles and colors slightly over time, which could also be considered a good thing).

For jeans, Levi's.

Haven't really tried too many brands, but those two were good enough for me that I don't feel like I need to make the decision for those two items ever again.

A little pricey, but they're merino so can be worn a few times without needing to be washed, and they're amazingly breathable and quick drying.

woolly.clothing

I don't think I own 100 items that use batteries. I mean, I'm curious, and I'll make a list, but I'm definitely not replacing things every year.

I've got a MacBook that's a few years old, an iPhone that's two years old, and AirPods that are less than a year old, and... my Apple TV remote is many years old and still only needs charging every couple of months. My Kindle is many years old and only needs charging every couple of weeks. My two USB power bricks still seem to be doing well. One is three years old, the other almost a year old. Apple Watch is about two years old, still makes it through almost two full days on a charge.

I think everything else electronic either plugs in or uses replaceable batteries (garage door opener, car keys).

I might be forgetting something, but 100 items is an order of magnitude more than I think I use, and I'm not replacing most of them most years.

And yes, I clearly consume a lot of Apple kit. I like to think I don't do so blindly, though.

I'm speaking more generally, not just about battery replacement. I cannot be in the mindset of disposable merchandise because I would be thinking about this stuff all the time.

To put this into perspective, you produce more waste with a grocery trip or a takeout order than you do with owning AirPods.

So let's start with the more impactful stuff before we get down to headphones that are used several hours a day every single day for a couple years.

Not to mention Apple has an extensive recycling program for most of their products.

> To put this into perspective, you produce more waste with a grocery trip or a takeout order than you do with owning AirPods.

That is probably only true in the US given the amount of regulation on compostable bags and boxes we have now in the EU.

Secondly, e-waste is orders of magnitude more difficult to dispose of and it often contains some rare minerals that got mined in some war zone in Africa: that should give you more of an incentive to recycle than some random styrofoam container.

Perhaps using numbers that are an order-of-magnitude out of line aren't helpful to your main point? If you're talking about replacing 100 items per year in a world where even ardent consumers of electronics own less than one-tenth that an replace, on average, none, that seems like a hard case to make.

I think there's a trend toward seeing electronics as consumable that bothers me, and I try to think carefully about my purchases, and yet somehow I've still ended up with at least eight items that use non-replaceable batteries, and maybe others that are "disposable" for other reasons.

Still, for each item I own, I've considered the "disposable" nature and yet bought it anyway.

Is the cumulative time spent screwing around reading reviews, comparing brands and choosing products more than the time spent replacing broken things? Just buying the cheapest thing that does what you are looking for saves a heck of a lot of time.

Everybody loves to go on about quality but quality doesn't always pan out in terms of time or money cost. There's plenty of cases where some thing you've bought will meet its end in a way unrelated to whether it's high or low quality. If you really want to optimize you have to tailor your purchasing to your specific use case.

I've tried all kinds of strategies.

A simple approach is to just pull the trigger quickly on whatever has a million 5 star reviews and looks acceptable and is cheap. This feels environmentally offensive. Throwing away something that 99% works with one broken part. I feel sick when I have to do this.

Another approach is to try to get something expensive but durable and fixable. Unfortunately we live in a crappy future where nobody has any pride anymore and nothing's built to last decades. I have a 30 year old jigsaw I got from my grandfather and I frickin' love it.

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