Are Discernment & Repair Revolutionary?

Photo @tanyabarrow

We live in a culture so concerned with perpetuating and amplifying our constant consumption that it treats maintenance like inefficiency.

Everything is meant to be replaced. Something breaks, you can just click "reorder" on Amazon. A hole in your sock, a tear in your sweater, that table leg that wobbles? Get rid of it, buy something new. Disposability has become the norm. And as a result, friction is bypassed. Anything that requires sustained attention or care is outdated, inconvenient, or simply not worth the trouble. The dominant logic is subtle but pervasive: if something demands effort to maintain, it has already failed. Effort isn't worth the effort.

And sometimes it really isn't. So much of what is available to us wasn't designed to last in the first place. The advice our parents gave us, to take care of our things so they last longer, no longer applies. There is no taking care of something designed to fail; there is only replacement.

And this is a problem. As I see it, one with two parts. Structural and psychological.

One, the decline in quality has lowered the standards for what we consider acceptable, and planned obsolescence has become the norm. We accept this daily with every purchase we make.

Two, the profit-at-all-costs logic of modern consumerism uses our brain chemistry against us to keep us addicted to buying new things, permeating our culture and the way we interact with the world. In a generation, we've seen the normalization of immediate gratification, impatience, entitlement, digital addictions, and a host of other impulses we might normally consider undesireable.

We've been trained to associate newness with virtue. New systems, new habits, new products, new versions of ourselves. We have accepted that to advance is to just buy the latest thing, not to ask why the last thing broke in the first place. We aren't encouraged to stop and consider why, despite all our technological advancements, we haven't figured out how to engineer consumer goods to be better, more sustainable, and longer-lasting. Progress is imagined as forward motion only, never downward, inward, or slower. Looking closely at what we already have is framed as stagnation. It's unfashionable to be "behind" all the latest updates in fashion, technology, or even language.

Coming at things with a repair mindset, by contrast, asks us to pause, inspect, and question why something has been designed the way it has, to consider whether we might improve it. That pause alone is disruptive, which is why it's being purposefully eroded over time.

Because in a disposable economy, stepping out of the cycle of consumption is quietly political.

Materially, repair interrupts planned obsolescence. It resists design decisions meant to shorten lifespans, seal components, and make intervention impossible. A sweater made from materials that allow for easy mending, a chair leg that can be tightened, a tool that can be sharpened, a smartphone that can be taken apart and fixed, these objects would defy a system built on churn.

Repair restores agency in small but meaningful ways. It reminds us that wear is not the opposite of value, but evidence of use. A repaired object carries marks—stitches, patches, reinforcements—that tell the truth about time. These marks are not flaws. They are records of care, visible proof that something mattered enough to keep. Evidence that it was made well enough in the first place to justify fixing.

But repair is not only material.

The same logic that tells us to replace objects trains us to replace jobs, hobbies, education, and identities. When something becomes uncomfortable, inefficient, or dull, the impulse is to move on. Discomfort is framed as incompatibility. Boredom is treated as failure. Repair asks a harder question: what is actually broken here, and what is simply asking something of me?

This distinction matters.

Not everything should be repaired. Some systems are exploitative. Some relationships are harmful or abusive. Some jobs dim our light in ways that no amount of tending can fix. A repair-first mindset is not about endurance at all costs. It is about discernment. It's about learning to tell the difference between harm and effort, between decay and change. Between quality and a con. It's about knowing when it's genuinely time to move on from something and when you're just being fickle.

Repair demands attention before abandonment. Inspection before judgment. It asks us to understand what went wrong rather than assume failure is inherent or inevitable. That kind of attention runs counter to a culture that externalizes consequences and postpones responsibility.

Repair also asks for skills—skills many of us were never taught, or were actively discouraged from learning. When objects are designed to be replaced rather than fixed, we lose not only material durability but confidence. With technology, especially, we lose the ability to determine if something is well-made when we're denied the right to fix it. We become dependent on systems that promise convenience while quietly eroding our capacity to intervene. Repair reverses that relationship, even if only partially. It reminds us that we are not entirely helpless inside the systems we inhabit.

Historically, repair was not a lifestyle choice. It was a necessity.
The ability to mend, fix, sharpen, and maintain one’s belongings was a form of competence—often associated with working-class life, resourcefulness, and survival rather than refinement. As mass production expanded and abundance became a marker of status, the ability to repair slowly gave way to the ability to replace as the signal of success.

That shift was not accidental. When repair becomes associated with poverty or failure, fewer people demand repairable goods. Skills are allowed to atrophy. Access to parts and knowledge is restricted. Dependency becomes normalized.

Today, this loss of agency is often enforced at the design level. Sealed electronics, proprietary software, inaccessible parts—many modern goods are deliberately engineered to prevent repair, even when owners are willing and capable. The growing right-to-repair movement exists not because people are nostalgic for fixing things, but because repair has been systematically removed as an option.

When the ability to repair is taken away, ownership itself becomes conditional.

Importantly, repair does not promise perfection.

Repaired things are rarely restored to “like new.” They are altered, adapted, changed. Sometimes visibly so. Repair accepts imperfection as part of continuity. It tells us that usefulness does not require flawlessness, and that longevity is something we actively participate in rather than purchase.

This participation takes time. It takes patience. It takes a willingness to stay with friction rather than escape it through novelty.

Choosing repair does not mean choosing it endlessly or uncritically. There are limits, personal, material, systemic. But when replacement becomes the default response to friction, we lose our ability to stay with complexity at all. We lose the muscle required for maintenance, relationships, and stewardship.

The entire economy runs on what we choose to buy or not buy; our choices are our greatest tool for creating a future that is more sustainable and equitable. That choice is everything. We don't have to stop consuming things; that would be impossible and impossibly bleak, even if we could fight the impulse. It's not about buying less or choosing minimalism. It's about buying better. Prioritizing quality and craftsmanship. Refusing cheap disposable garbage and using our discernment to reshape the future of consumer goods, the environment, and the way we interact.