If It Ain't Broken

This may not be EXACTLY on the Minimalist idea.. but I think it lines up!

One of the things that I've been trying to adapt to in my life, is not buying all kinds of stupid shit. Yeah it would be cool or fun to get a few new gadgets or toys or something, but we also need to ask ourselves, "do we REALLY need that?" and sometimes the answer is yes, but often times the answer is definitely "NO" and we should listen to this.

Recently I've been having a little scuffle of willpower with my wife about not throwing shit out just because it's a bit older. For example, the trash barrel that we have in the kitchen. It's old, it was smelly and it was generally dirty. It wasn't broken though, and that's the important thing! What I ended up doing to fix the issue was take some good old fashioned elbow grease and got to work. I sat there one day and for 25 minutes I cleaned the thing top to bottom, inside and out and got the thing looking almost like new! It was never done, at least since I've lived here, so I made sure to be the one to do it. We've sprayed things inside it here and there to kill the smell or germs, like Lysol or something, but we never got some gloves on and gave the fucker a deep clean. I was glad that I did!

I think this definitely goes to a mindset. There is such an unnecessary consumerist mindset in the world today. They are trying to make everything disposable, everything planned obsolescence so that we have to keep buying shit. It's a real shame, because it's fueled largely by greed and corporatism.

To be clear, I am NOT saying "capitalism bad" or "people are evil". For the bad rap that capitalism gets, it's CRONYISM that is the real beast. When companies buy politicians so that their product is the only one around, but doing it through money they earned from the capitalist economy. That's where things get fucked up and is far beyond the tenets of a free market economy that works very well among many hundreds of millions of people around the world. We wouldn't have the technology or things that we have today without free enterprise making a fuck ton of progress and inventions. Look at countries like North Korea for an example of what the opposite of a free market is, and what the end result is.

What I am a big proponent of though, is not just throwing something away because it looks ugly or is a little worn out. I have been trying to extend the life of many things in the house that we live in so that we can just not need to spend money unnecessarily. Another example is the oven or other appliances. We recently had the oven break in the heating element inside it which allows it to bake and get to temperature. So many people, for one reason or another, would say the oven is junk and throw it away for a new one. The fucking stupid thing about it is that the oven was FINE it was just a tiny part of it that broke! I bought the part online for 25 fucking dollars and the oven works just as good as before! What the hell people?!

My wife was ready to toss the oven in the trash to get a new one. I was like wtf babe, it's so simple to just fix the damn thing! She acquiesced and it got fixed, and we saved several hundreds of dollars. These are the things that amaze me, where people would rather throw something away if there is an issue with it, instead of working to fix it. It's not that difficult!

I think there is going to be a shift towards saving more though, for various reasons. We know that the planet is being filled with trash unnecessarily, and a lot of it is highly poisonous and won't decompose or anything like that. That produces a whole host of issues, but at the same time we are also struggling financially. This means that there will be plenty of people looking to save some money by just fixing what they've got, and that's a great thing! It empowers people to just save some money and fix what they have, learn a thing or two and become a little bit more of a minimalist than they were a few months or years prior

What about you, do you try and fix, clean or make the best out of something so that you don't have to toss it and get a new one? Let me know in the comments!