If you will indulge me in an old man moment, I remember when bumpers could bump things. A glorious recent past when you could nudge things in the winter months and not damage anything. There were even laws that dictated a bumper could not be damaged in a low speed impact.
Take a walk down a street in Yorkton and you’re going to notice that bumpers aren’t made for bumping anymore. Many cars have cracks and holes in their bumping area.
All of these cracks cost about a thousand dollars to fix. Which inevitably means that most people will just shrug and say that driving around with a cracked bumper is probably fine. The result is that as we go, there will be more and more cracks on more and more cars.
Now, old bumpers were not exactly pretty. They were massive chrome girders that could double as a small bench. In terms of aerodynamics, they were not ideal, being giant chrome rectangles designed to bash in snow, buildings, and small children.
Now cars can’t even run over a single small child without doing significant damage.
Cars are not the only devices where durability is not as high a priority anymore. Take, for example, my phone. It is a slick looking combination of glass and aluminum. This looks very cool, shiny, and futuristic.
My first phone was not shiny and futuristic. It was a bit of silver plastic with rubber buttons and a cheap screen. It did not look cool.
However, if I needed to hold off a mugger, my old phone could do that effectively. I could have swung it around by its antenna and used it as an improvised weapon. Then, robber subdued, I could call the police.
My current phone, a beacon of the future, will shatter into a pile of broken glass if used as a weapon. It lives in a rubber case so it doesn’t get a boo-boo when I inevitably drop it, limiting the opportunity to admire the slick and futuristic design, which would be covered in scratches anyway if it wasn’t in its little shell.
I think we may have misplaced our priorities. In both of these cases, and many others, we are putting our greatest priority on making things look cool. Outside of cameras – which looked cooler in the 1960s – all of our stuff is at peak cool. Slick looking materials, whether it’s shiny glass or impressive metal, plastic in artistically pleasing shapes. The problem is that cool is the top priority. Phones are dropping headphone jacks because they need to be thinner to look cool. Everything is more fragile in order to meet the cool threshold.
I want to end this by declaring we need to stop this obsession with looking cool and focus on what matters, making products that will last a long time and wear well. I want to say we should focus on function, rather than form above all else.
But then I realize I probably would buy the cool looking stuff myself. And that’s how we have wound up in this situation.
