Fixing vs Replacing

Both my parents know how to sew and stitch, if a pair of trousers ripped, either one would be able to fix them up.  I have a basic understanding of how to sew, but I wouldn't be able to fix a pair of trousers if they tore apart.  I'm of the generation that would buy a new pair if that happened, partly because clothes are lower quality and cheaper today than they were in the past but also partly because there is a mentality that they're not worth fixing as a result or that if you do fix them they're only going to come apart again in future and it's less hassle in the long run just to replace them.

For me it's out with the old and in with the new, unless there is a deep sentimental attachment which for some pieces of clothing I own there is - although I don't actually wear any of those they are all folded away in drawers or hanging in a wardrobe as reminders and keepsakes rather than being anything I would actually wear, most of them don't even fit me anymore being from my late teenage years or early 20s.

I don't know where or when this shift in mentality occurred, even when I was a kid, if school uniforms got damaged then my Mum would sew them up, shoes would be repaired too rather than buying new.  Around my college years the amount of money we had never really changed but I remember buying new clothes at that time when old ones became damaged.  I don't know what caused the change in mentality for me personally.  Beyond myself however, I know similar experiences are held by people like me that have one foot in the generation before and one foot in the generation after.  Like the transition between old technology and new, I witnessed a world without the Internet and world with it.  I've seen the mentality of fixing things rather than replacing them, and I've seen the mentality of upgrading rather than maintaining.

When I wrote about technology, particularly my old laptop that I still hold onto, I mentioned how technology has a lifespan, a length of time we expect it to last before it needs replacing.  It's a lot harder to determine the lifespan of things like clothing.  I tend to hold onto clothes for as long as I think it still looks okay or until it becomes damaged.  To that end, I don't actually know how old most of my pieces of clothing are.  I've moved houses six times in my life if you count the places I lived whilst studying at University, those moves are the only way I can determine how old anything is, I ask myself where I was living when I bought it.  Beyond that rough time frame, I can't pin down a date not even to a year as to how old things are.  I don't keep receipts of things most of those just get shredded when I know I don't need to keep it to return them.

If I actually knew how old some of my clothes were then perhaps I could be a better judge of how long I should expect something to last.  Perhaps then I would be more willing to repair the old to get my money's worth out of them.  What does surprise me however is something that contradicts what I said earlier.  Above I said that clothes today are cheaper than they once were and there is a mentality that they are not worth fixing as a result.  The surprising thing is that I have a range of clothing and shoes that are quite cheap to reasonably expensive, but there's absolutely no correlation between price and how long something lasts.  I know for a fact that a pair of shoes I own are now 4 years old - I know this because I ordered them online and the website has an order history so I can see the date of those at least.  I also know someone who bought a pair of shoes that were almost 4 times the price, not just 1 pair but 2, less than 2 years ago and they already need to be replaced.  I remember when they bought them and thinking to myself I wouldn't pay that for a pair of shoes, their retort at the time was that they were high quality and they would last - not surprising this led to a very interesting conversation about the fact my shoes were still good, so I am not sure how much validity the argument about price actually has.

Then again maybe it's not about price, maybe it's about effort, it's just simpler to buy something new rather than put the effort into fixing something especially with the belief that if you fix it once, you'll have to fix it again in future and you don't know how many times that will happen, so in your mind you rationalise that the sum total of all the effort you would put into fixing it outweighs the effort of going to buy something new.