I’ve been thinking about a cultural shift for a while. On the surface it may seem like something stuck in the past, but it’s not nostalgia, nor technophobia, but a kind of cultural loop.
So what the hell am I talking about? haha another 
For most of modern history, people didn’t choose quality. They defaulted to it because there wasn’t an alternative. You bought one good pair of shoes because you couldn’t afford to replace them. You owned one fountain pen because a cheap pen didn’t exist yet. Watches cost a small fortune, but you bought it because you had to if you wanted to be a part of society, and there was no cheap option.
All these quality items were expensive. Very expensive. Because of this, a large repair industry arose around them. With care, quality would last a lifetime, but accidents do happen, and people aren’t always careful. If your fridge that cost a large fraction of your annual salary broke, there was no thought of replacing it — that would be unaffordable — you repaired it.
Then the mass-market revolution arrived. We gained variety, convenience, and, crucially, the ability to buy things that were deliberately built not to last. Planned obsolescence didn’t begin with iPhones, despite what anti-Apple people love to yell; it began with the idea that objects could be manufactured cheaply enough that replacement became the default. Even the marketing changed. Companies didn’t just sell products; they sold disposability as liberation. Why bother with the upkeep of a “fussy” fountain pen when a dozen ballpoints cost less than a dollar? Why resole shoes when new ones were only slightly more expensive? Why repair the VCR when you could toss it and grab another? Sure, none of these disposable things were as nice to use as the older quality items, but that was easy to ignore with prices so incredibly cheap.
Maybe I’m putting it kind of glibly, but that was basically the message. It was as if the industry was crying out Hallelujah! You no longer have to save up your precious money and can now own all this stuff at only a fraction of the cost! And you can see the appeal. In those days, a decent pen effectively cost the equivalent of $100 or more today, but now suddenly you could get multiple pens for under a dollar. Who cares if they aren’t as nice to use — that is a hell of a savings!
For a while, we embraced it. Not because it was wise, but because it felt like progress. Cheapness had become a symbol of abundance: look how much stuff we can surround ourselves with. I mean… yeah. It made us all feel like the rich. Minimalism wasn’t a virtue then. Maximizing — owning more variations, more colors, more backups — was the sign you had arrived. It became a symbol of the middle class.
But the curve didn’t stop there.
At some point, many of us realized that cheapness disguised its own cost. You weren’t saving money; you were paying in small, constant drips. Pens that cracked, headphones that broke at the connector, shoes designed to collapse after a season, appliances just sturdy enough to stagger out of the warranty period. The “cheap is fine” confidence of the late 20th century began eroding as people watched the expense of constant replacement accumulate. Sure, you can run to the dollar store and pick up a shopping cart of things for under $50, but a year later few of those things will still be in one piece.
And this is where the curve bends back.
We now live in a contradictory time: Amazon and AliExpress can deliver a truckload of disposable objects to your doorstep, but simultaneously, there’s a clear drift toward fewer, better things. It isn’t universal. Plenty of people still prefer the cheapest option available, of course. But the cultural mood has definitely shifted. People are rediscovering the logic that their great-grandparents didn’t choose but lived within: buy something good once, and it costs less over time.
I’m reminded of Sam Vimes theory of socioeconomic unfairness from the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. … A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. … But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
Buying cheap is actually more expensive in the long run than buying quality. Society is finally coming around to this idea that Pratchett put so well in 1993.
It’s not the same as vintage romanticism or a rejection of modernity. It’s more practical than that. If you’ve ever replaced a $40 pair of shoes five times in three years, you know this lesson. If you’ve ever thrown out five cheap backpacks that failed at the seams, the zipper, or the straps, you know it too. The math is obvious once you see it. The shock is that we forgot the math for fifty years as we listened to corporations whispering in our ears.
Even Japan, which held onto repair culture longer, isn’t immune. Sub-¥100 shops expanded aggressively. Fast fashion exploded. Cheap stationery became the default for students who once would’ve carried the same metal pen for years. That shift didn’t erase Japan’s respect for quality; it simply buried it under convenience. But the same reversal is happening here too. High-end crafts and tools are experiencing a revival, not as luxury status symbols, but as frustration-avoidance. People are tired of objects that die on schedule.
The irony is that modern production could easily give us durable goods. We have the materials and the technical ability. What we lost was the expectation that things should last. But expectations change. And the revival of quality isn’t coming from the top down; it’s coming from the bottom up. It’s coming from the irritation of the same people who once embraced cheapness. You get tired of junk. You get tired of the hidden cost of “cheap”. You get tired of the landfill feeling every time another gadget breaks in your hands. Eventually the frustration becomes a type of clarity: if you save up for a well-made thing, you stop thinking about it. It just works.
This shift also lines up with another modern force: the desire to reduce mental clutter. People want fewer decisions and fewer replacements. They want to stop researching a new vacuum every year, stop replacing headphones every six months, stop worrying about whether the zipper will fail on a trip. Good objects reduce friction. Bad objects multiply it.
And while corporations still pump out disposable goods, the cultural “pull” is changing. The younger generation isn’t impressed by a drawer full of cheap stuff. They don’t want thirty pens; they want one pen they never have to think about again. The pendulum is drifting toward intention rather than accumulation.
None of this means the old world is coming back. We won’t return to an era where one pair of boots lasts fifty years and you repair the soles every winter and pass them down to your son. But we might settle on a kind of balance. Instead of cheap Walmart boots that aren’t ever all that comfortable and need to be replaced in a year, we might buy a pair of Redwings that last ten before we even think about a replacement, and are super comfortable the entire time. Instead of a bag of BIC pens that all stop writing in a week, we buy the $2–5 dollar Uni gel pen that is a joy to use and lasts until we replace the ink and beyond. The psychological shift is happening. We’re renegotiating our relationship to objects. The cheap wave exhausted itself, and people are sensing the trap behind it.
That’s the rebellion. It may not be a dramatic, ideological revolt, but it is rebellion nevertheless: a slow, quiet refusal to keep buying things that insult our intelligence. A decision to step out of the replacement cycle and into something simpler: buy fewer things, buy better things, and let them fade into the background of your life, where good tools belong.
[I was partially inspired on this topic by this article]
If you enjoyed this, you might also like my other posts on tools, culture, and how small choices reveal big economic patterns. Follow for more!
| David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Bluesky. |
