When I saw 3310, I immediately thought of this...

To be fair, the smart phones nowadays do so many more things, and has such a big power hungry screen, which explains the short battery life. Besides being a hammer, your 3310 pretty much only make calls, do SMS, and let you play snake. Maybe compose a ringtone or two if you have the patience.

We are overwhelmed by a lot of cheap, poorly built products these days; this gives an illusion that all products out there are cheap and poorly built. But if you take time to find them, I think high quality products are out there. You just have to look for them and be willing to pay the price for them. Most importantly, you need to be able to tell the difference between the quality stuff from the cheap stuff.

You might do a bit of over-consumption for a few years, when you're young and have a little bit of disposable income / no dependents but eventually most people's mindsets turn to that of saving and becoming more conservative in view. Perhaps it's because you realise how much work is needed to earn so little? I'm generalising of course, there's a lot of old lefties out there too.

Perhaps it's because we realise the futility of searching for the next best thing. I for one have been guilty of assigning some sort of imagined value to an object. It might make you happy for a short while but that moment is fleeting and soon the (G)ear (A)cquisition (S)yndrome kicks back in and you itch for the next thing.

Without going too wacky religious on you... I think the buddhists have it right. They see no intrinsic value in anything because everything is in a constant state of change. It's an illusion that having the thing will bring you happiness; it's actually the opposite. You will suffer in different ways if you hold on to things. The idea is to let go.

Going even deeper into 'emptiness', the idea that any object is actually an object is debatable because the object is made up lots of constituent parts. Once you see an object is just a collection of smaller bits it becomes less valuable, not even an object - it's an illusion of an object.

I've drifted off the subject but fuck it, it's Friday, so's here's my anecdote.

When I was clearing out a garage once. I found a CD in a box with a load of other shite, it was the Stoneroses' 'Second Coming' album. I had forgotten I had it, I held it in my hands and reminisced about my teenage years. I remembered I had to go to the local record shop in my hometown and ORDER IT IN, hah. It took a couple of weeks and then the goth store owner calls me up "Hey man, your CD is here." I dashed down there full of excitement and got home, probably listened to it a hundred times; it's a great album.

"Wow!" I thought to myself, so glad to have rediscovered it and happy to reconnect with the object and the memories. I put it to one side carefully... "I'm keeping that little gem safe."

I continue to sift through the box of other crap and suddenly... WHAT. THE. FUCK? There's another identical Stoneroses CD in there. I must have picked up another, borrowed it or something...

So now I'm in a real quandry.

Do I keep them both and assign some sort of 50% nostagia value to them? Clearly that's mental. Do I keep one of them? and hope that I've picked the original? And then I question why do I even want to keep what's little more than a piece of plastic?

And that's when it dawned on me. LET GO. And I did. I've let go of a lot of stuff since. But the funny thing is, I now think MORE about the CD, the memory and that experience than I ever would have done if I put the thing back in the box. So much so I bothered to tell you fine folks about it.

Have a good day.

Isn’t it annually now? I could be wrong

Only that it's not "our inclination". It's how the system is set up, and it actively fights attempts to break out of it, which means we're actually inclined to consume more durable things - we're not stupid - but they're clearing us for carpet bombing when we try.

We all know they're making phones unusable after three years, and they do so by software updates. This is so open that the French have banned it.

An open case of this is the right to repair, where companies use copyright and patent claims, "security" claims and outright refusal to have you legally own the gadgets you "buy" to restrict your right to do anything with it outside of that which serves the company. And repairing it, modifying it, jailbreaking it etc are not things, of course, that serve the company bottom line - so you're literally a criminal trying to do any of these things, on devices you "bought" (but turns out you didn't).

A great short story of science fiction (not all that fictional) is "unauthorized bread" (full text: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/). It relies on laws that are already in effect today to tell the story of a "criminal" who repairs toasters to make them accept "non-authorized" bread brands. It's the printer business model.

Add this to the common practice of creating demand by slight changes (again, the iPhone disease) and by social pressure (another symptom of iPhone disease: what, you don't have the iPhone 2030imega yet? I have no clue what iPhone numbers are.)

There is no "inclination" to overconsume. There is relentless pressure, and then there is the inclination, quite on the opposite, to resist that. This is clearly visible by the fact that the industry is fighting this inclination tooth and nail.