A lot of thought and talk goes into how good things are, when they’re new, and the review industry is big business. A smaller amount of thought goes into durability, but some people do think about it: there are products with lifetime warranties, the buy it for life movement, and human longevity research.

Longevity researchers have discovered that “lifespan” is a misleading metric. Often, people die gradually, not all at once. Sometimes, people can’t even decide whether someone is dead or alive: it’s that ambiguous. So a single number doesn’t really cover the decay curve. “Healthspan”, and disability-adjusted life-years, became the new metrics.

(I think we could go further, and coin some kind of meaning-span — the time someone lives before becoming jaded and giving up — in order to codify the Jack Londen-esq I’d rather be ashes than dust sentiment.)

But in the case of physical things, we are still stuck with concepts that map more closely to “lifespan” than “healthspan” (let alone meaningspan). But the healthspan of products is as relevant as it is for humans.

Different materials decay in different ways. It’s an oversimplification, but, broadly, cotton fails beautifully. It gets softer, and denim, according to the people who buy jeans that have been destroyed before they even got them, falls apart in alluring ways. It fails in a fairly predictable, linear fashion. Same with copper and brass and silver, which develop patinas that some people like, and wood and leather, which weather fairly well. (Wood does rot, so that’s an exception.)

Manufactured materials, in contrast, tend to get ugly with age. Polyester pills up, and then bursts. It shrinks in the dryer until pants cling like shrink-wrap. Spandex bags out grotesquely, while the other fibers try to hold the garment together. Plastic patio furniture develops that cell-y sunburned I’m-turning-to-dust layer that is ick, while wood just turns grey and slimy like decaying materials are meant to.

But material is only part of it. Quality also affects decay patterns. A well-built thing will tend to decay more elegantly than a poorly built thing. A poorly built thing tends to have weak points that fail dramatically. Well-built things tend to just wear down. Immanuel touched on this in his article on joyful frugality: sometimes, being cheap is expensive. But when you buy a pair of cheap polyester pants from Costco, the tag doesn’t say, “looks great now but will be a pill festival in two weeks!”, or “$3 per wear and then a lot of stress about it not being recyclable”, or “2-for-1 jeans that turn into tights in the dryer!!!”, or “advanced self-disassembling model”.

Software is like this, too. Vibecoded apps that are packed with features tend to explode into a mosaic of loading icons and error messages when you try to actually use them. BSD, from my limited experience, is like a slower, jankier version of Linux, but the way it fails is so much more fun. It just slows down. You can watch the re-paints happening in real time. It’s a very small motor with a very large gearbox, that just keeps going uphill. Linux has more motor, but less gearbox, so it goes fast until smoke comes out of the hood, but then it doesn’t go at all.

Modularity also matters. If something can be replaced piecemeal, it’s more likely it can be repaired. If electronics fails, and it’s surface mount and potted in some nasty goo, there isn’t all that much hope (I’ve never managed to fix a quartz watch). But mechanical watches, and boots that can be re-soled, and laptops like golden era Thinkpads and Frameworks, with multiple different modules that plug into each other, can, though repeated Phoenix-esq rebirths, become objects-of-Theseus.

And, yes, humans are like this, too. There are NetBSD people: not fast or glamorous, but just as functional when under extreme load as any other time. And then there are polyester people, who look great in the store and fall apart two weeks later.

When shopping, building, and dating, consider: will I still love this when it falls apart? Because that’s a larger portion of the lifespan of products and people than it may seem.