the age of disappointment

One of my earliest childhood memories involves a bicycle. I am pretty sure it was a tricycle, in fact, but no one who was around for the event (my parents) can verify this. This event, as it turns out, had a profound effect on my life that resonates today as I navigate the adult world. It's a tale of a changing world from my parents' generation to mine, a clash of worldviews, and a sense of injustice I have not been able to shake, not that I care to.

I must have been younger than five, when I distinctly recall my dad bringing me the bad news- someone (could have been a parent or a visiting friend), had run over my tricycle with a car. It was made apparent that this was my fault for leaving it in the driveway, although the lesson was probably not driven home too harshly. Little kids do stuff like that and don't need to be harangued about it to make it sink in.

I don't remember much about the tricycle other than it has yellow plastic wheels and a chrome-plated frame. The rear horizontal bar that housed the axle had grip tape on it so you could stand and push it like a scooter, which was way more fun than pedaling it as soon as the rider is big enough to do so. Standing and pushing the tricycle was a major accomplishment, a "big kid" moment for me. My memory of it might not be objectively accurate, but the subjective experience is what made me who I am, so the inaccuracies stand as the only truth that counts.

I think the rear axle had been mangled and one of the wheels flattened out, rendering it unrideable. Like most Americans raised in the '60s, my dad expected that any manufactured item could be repaired at a local hardware store or the retailer with readily available spare parts. Try as he might, the parts were not available. The best course of action was to throw the tricycle away and buy another one. True, someone with access to tools and materials might have been able to fabricate something to repair it, but that was not a realistic option for us at the moment. The tricycle was totaled because of one damaged component.

We didn't have a lot of money, and even if we did, the sense of impropriety for throwing away something and buying a new one seemed improper, savage even. The reality of the modern age was a shock to my dad, and was cemented as the unalterable trajectory of the future for me at the tender age of five.

It turns out that I am not alone in my sense of injustice at this. Many people resist, or pretend to, the throw-away culture that produces disposable goods at too-good-to-resist prices. There are often durable options (Rolls Royce makes car that last virtually forever, Chris King makes bicycle hubs with similar qualities) but those options are often cost-prohibitive to the average consumer. While many acknowledge the truth of "buy once, cry once" (meaning that, if you buy something expensive but durable, you only fret over that cost once because you won't have to replace it), we often resolve to buy the cheap option that we know we'll have to replace when it wears out in short order.

I feel like I need to "earn" the privilege of simply replacing something that is broken. I feel a drive to make a good-faith effort to repair, modify, even kludge something that is not working optimally, as if trying to fix something is an indulgence that I must endure before proceeding to enjoy the carnal pleasure of enjoying a functioning car, television, or bicycle. I'm not Catholic, by the way, but somehow that theological sense of appeasing the universe in exchange for my enjoyment of life has been ever present.

The pervasive presence of planned obsolescence has forced to us accept this, at great cost to the environment, our savings, and our sanity. Some resign themselves to not fight it, while others merely grumble about it. Very few move into the woods and isolate themselves in a suspended animation of technological progress. Most of us just accept it, despite that fact that that is the most cumulatively irrational but individually rational choice one can make. Arguing about it makes buffoons out of anyone who engages the topic as the stakes create in a zero-sum game over the meaning of civilization.

While most of us resolve ourselves to replacing broken things, giving up before we begin to think about fixing it, there's a sense of "hell yeah" when we see someone succeed in bucking that trend. When you see a bicycle with a reinforced tube that was cracked and re-welded, a modified multi-tool that has house keys instead of a bottle opener, or a car that plays everyone's favorite song instead of a dull ping, there's a sense of triumph. Some of us have stolen fire from the gods and created something new in our own image.