At least in developed countries I feel like most consumption could stop and daily life wouldn't be any worse off.
Maybe we should recast frugality as "financial edging". Think about buying something but refrain so that when you do finally give in the rush is enhanced.
People who dont have computers should simply cancel their expensive netflix subscription and not eat avocados on toast. Within 5-7 years they too will have saved up enough for a deposit on an entry level GPU and some RAM.
Personally my gaming pc is from 2019 which by industry standards is bordering on obsolete junk. But compared to the game consoles I was playing not that long ago this thing has virtually infinite power and should be expected to last far longer than it currently is.
My cellphone is inching towards 5 years, and it is perfectly serviceable. I could likely keep using it for years more. I am having to look at a replacement in the near future because there will be mo more updates for it.
And for computers, most people could probably make do with machines that are many years old and not feel a difference in their capabilities.
That would be true if not for 50MB-heavy JavaScript webpages.
Same goes for smartphone apps. Facebook app used to be a few megabytes in size and it was already very big compared to other apps you had on the phone.
Works like a charm, does everything I need, just not very good for more demanding games due to lack of a dedicated GPU.
Now I have 32 gigabytes of ram and games still sometimes run terribly. Which highlights the point that consumption is limitless. If I had 4 terabytes of ram devs would just build the game in node and never free memory just because they don’t have to.
Those are the sort of programmes which could be built on - so, for instance, you could mandate a floor on trade-in values so that manufacturers would have to pay, say, at least 5% of the purchase price to take back even broken, obsolete, or life-expired items rather than merely not charging.
Yes, that might need to be reflected to some degree in the purchase price for lower-margin goods, but there'd be a bunch of positive effects - making it worth the manufacturer's while to prioritise reuse and recycling when specifying components, reducing the risk of inappropriate disposal, supporting a secondary market for component reuse (as already exists in places like Shenzen), and reinforcing a less disposable culture.