Perceived obsolescence is a kind of perception of "staying up to date and maintaining social status" created by companies on people. This perception is usually created by advertisements. Although this perception is in many sectors such as fashion, nowadays, the target is especially technological products because we live in a technological age. Technological products are no longer for need as before; they are taken for color, popularity, etc. So it's like following the fashion program, whatever's in this year's creation is taken. The best-known example of this is the iPhone. The iPhone 1, produced by Apple in 2007, is expected to be 12 in 2020. 12 updated top model in 13 years (excluding models such as pro vs). You buy the most popular phone in the year you bought it, not because you actually need it, but as popular. As if you pick up that phone, you will be up to date and you will not be left behind, here is the classic herd psychology. However, when you get that phone, it's not too long before a top model comes out. New features have been added, existing features have been further improved; camera, battery, etc. This time, that phone you get because it's actually popular suddenly seems outdated or garbage to you. Even though you don't need it, now the new product becomes psychologically your need, and you find yourself buying a top model phone. In addition even the company has set a strategy, the old model that you have is slowing down after the new model comes out. So if you don't want to follow this herd psychology, the company is forced to make you up and you have to. Then again the same vicious circle after buying a top model. Better, more beautiful, more popular, more up-to-date, better quality, better photographer etc. In short, there is no limit to this. In fact, the more we consume, the more we become depleted. We can call it a black hole for perceived or planned obsolescence.
#PlannedObsolescence
"People work hundreds of hours to buy the #products they want never knowing that it was never going to last, is this how you really want to spend your life, in perpetual #debt buying products that were designed to fail?"
I like the analogy about people as livestock being herded along in a desired direction by a greater power and we just going along...either in ignorance to it all or just apathetic.....
#Think #SpiritualAwakening #LiveLife
It is impossible to live in Nicaragua for very long and not notice how much of the material world here consists of things being reused, something we've mentioned in passing before but which merits more attention.
The school buses from North America are perhaps the most visible example of this. All of the public transportation save for a handful of old (and a very few new) Brazilian and Russian buses are the familiar old, growling, yellow hulks that prowl the streets and roads of the U.S. and Canada every morning and afternoon from August to June (and often in the summer too). We've seen one as old as 1979 and as recent a vintage as 2001. Most have had all traces of the school districts they once served completely erased, though occasionally not (Canandaigua, as we mentioned awhile back, Muscatine Iowa, Port Arthur, TX, Newport, VA are a few of the town/city school district names we've spotted).
The big over-the-road rigs also seem mostly to be recycled from the U.S. and Canada based on some of the old stickers you sometimes see stuck to them, and many of the trailers and smaller panel trucks too—it can be jarring to look up and see English lettering announcing “Bob's Rental World” or “Carpenter Landscaping, Stockton, CA.” The flatbed and stakebed trucks are often 30 years old or more, and have been outfitted with yet more of the welded metal infrastructure required for passengers to have at least something to cling to. Ironically, the actual school “bus” for the secondary school students in the community (who have to go 5 km to the junior high and high school in Totogalpa) is in fact a canvas-covered stakebed truck which looks for all the world like a re-purposed old army truck. Every morning about 7:30 and every afternoon about 1:30 it comes trundling through the village, kids jumping on or off at designated stops.
To the North American eye, it can initially be a bit shocking to see the number of people who travel in the backs of such trucks. One day we were working and Hilario called out, “¡Un monton de gente!” And, indeed, there was a stakebed truck driving past with so many people in and clinging to it that they mushroomed over the edges and above the welded bars. We knew it was a special sight since even a native Nicaraguan commented on it! To date, the most dangerous such scene we've observed was a flatbed with some long pieces of conduit angled from the bed up over the cab, secured somehow, and with three guys reclining on the pipe. It would seem that most of the tires for the trucks (and buses) are also of the reused variety, re-treaded if you're lucky, bald if you're not.* Although Nicaragua is not Cuba, there are also a fair number of 20+ year old cars on the road—it's easy to forget how much boxier cars used to be.
*It is worth saying that although standards of safety here fall far below those to which we are accustomed, it is also the case that accidents don't seem any more frequent. Moreover, the general attitude of not worrying unduly about unlikely eventualities seems like a healthy one for the most part. People are not fatalistic; rather, they seem to accept the world as it is, which is to say that while life is neither predictable nor completely safe, accidents are rare, tragedy even more so. So why focus on risk? Maybe this is just another way of saying that they put into practice the sentiments of Niebuhr's famous “Serenity Prayer” better than many risk-obsessed Americans.
Lumber gets used and reused until it is too small to serve any function other than being burned, and screws too (nails seem to be one-use only). As we noted in the last entry on plastic, Nicaragua has been drawn into the disposable world of plastic along with most other places in the world, but a lot of it gets serves (re)useful functions for years. Plastic onion bags get used until they begin to fall apart, at which point they are cut into smaller pieces to be used as dish scrubbies and exfoliators. Plastic containers bigger than a liter get reused in countless ways (for hauling and storing water above all, including buckets that clearly once contained lubricant or some other petroleum product!).
Water itself is reused for irrigation after serving for washing dishes, clothes, or bodies, channeled or carried to trees and plants in gardens. Indeed, being here has highlighted for us the absurdity of the way we use—or, rather, don't use—gray water in most places in the U.S. We invest enormous amounts of money in infrastructure to purify water, most of which serves purposes that manifestly do not require purification (laundry, showering and bathing, dish washing). Then, rather than use the gray water produced by these activities, we send it straight into the sanitary sewers with the effluent that does need treating (like pee and poop, though, as we noted a few weeks back, even our toilets could segregate waste much more sustainably), investing yet more money in cleaning a great deal of waste water that could be put to use without the cleansing. But we are now trapped by our existing infrastructure, a classic "progress trap," in the words of historian Ronald Wright (whose book A Short History of Progress is well worth the read).
And it seems that most of the clothing worn here had a previous owner—judging by the various things silk-screened onto the t-shirts, a previous owner in the U.S. Lots of 5K and other event t-shirts (why do event organizers persist in giving away t-shirts? is there anyone in the U.S. who doesn't have enough t-shirts?). Pre-owned t-shirts abound, but other clothing items too.
There is still plenty of waste here, and perceived obsolescence. The culture of reuse is by far more one of necessity than choice. Nonetheless, the fact remains that by reusing and extending the functional life of so many things, Nicaraguans are coming far closer to that old New England mantra than almost any Americans: “Wear it out, fix it up, make it do.” This kind of conservation use to be a way of life in the U.S.
One reason why our ecological footprint is so enormous these days is because we have abandoned that ethic. Take one of those old buses, for example. I don't know the statistics for buses, but when you factor in embodied energy (the energy required to produce something, from the extraction of the natural resources, to the energy used in its manufacture, to the transportation of the finished good from factory to consumer) the average new automobile has already approached the 50% threshold of lifetime energy consumption when it roles off the assembly line (which is why while the “cash for clunkers” program may have made a bit of sense in terms of economic recovery—though there's debate about that too—it was a terrible idea in terms of bigger picture sustainability).
And everything we buy new has that embodied energy cost, which gets amortized over the life of the thing--so doesn't it make sense to use all our stuff as long as we can? Anyway, necessity drives just such practices here, one of the many things we can learn from Nicaraguans.
Just a note--with a visit from my (Michael's) sister beginning on Tuesday and much of the country shutting down for Holy Week, it may be more than a week before we can post again. As always, thanks for reading!
