Planned Obsolescence

Second of two chair legs with replacement side wing hand carved in mahogany. Photo by author.

Most of us understand the notion of planned obsolescence. It’s baked into our daily lives. An appliance works for a few years, then something breaks. It’s not cost effective to repair, so it gets replaced. Clothing is made so cheaply with such low grade materials that we are lucky to get one season’s worth of wear before having to replace it.

It’s maddening. I hate it. I try to shop carefully for repairable appliances, which isn’t generally successful. I am considering making my own clothes. They will be way more expensive to make than ready-to-wear, but they might last for the rest of my life (with repairs). And I hate shopping.

Planned obsolescence is hardly new. The degree to which it pervades our lives might be, though. Take this chair I recently worked on. I can’t say that I know what the chair actually looks like, all I received was an oversized zip-lock bag with leg pieces. Six or so, representing most of two heavily carved chair legs.

My husband spent a couple of weeks, give or take, figuring out which pieces went where, then gluing them back together. That left each chair leg missing one side piece: the right side on the first leg, and the left side on the second one. He cut and glued a piece of mahogany into each of the missing areas and I carved the surfaces to match. Fortunately, perhaps, I could copy the remaining pattern from the second leg…