Wendy

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The sun is shining, and the flowers are blooming beautifully.

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I didn’t have any special plans tonight, just music and some quiet time at home. Turns out a peaceful evening can be filled with its own kind of happiness. 🎵

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partial / draft essay—
a Critique of "buy it for life" culture—

i used to be into the BIFL, "buy nice or buy twice", Best Of subculture, but now i think it's overly pretentious and, worse, falls into the same trap it claims to solve.

the idea behind BIFL is that you spend a lot upfront for something „quality“ which has intangible benefits that will pay off over a long(er) lifespan than buying something cheap.

so BIFL-ers are big into, say, safety razors—big old honks of steel that take cheap disposable safety blades V.S. gilette disposable blades, because the former is Quality Steel and not Ripping You Off with expensive refills and the latter is Fake Engineering and Not As Good As They Say.

you can see that, exemplified by the case of Steel Safety Razors, there are a few coöcurring beliefs embedded in the BIFL worldview: that things made in the best were made better due to modern „enshittification“; that modern features are generally distracting frills which subtract from the core value prop of the product; that owning fewer items in life is better than owning many; that owning one item for longer is more virtuous than going through many; that knowledge and skill should be expected of ordinary consumers who use consumer products.

i will describe in detail, later down, how each of these beliefs manifest in the case of safety razors, and how they are false or unwieldy, and talk about the other hobby horses, like goodyear-welted boots; cast iron skillets; rimowa luggage.

the coöcurring beliefs i mentioned are partly about industrial design, about material goods themselves, but i came to see them more as statements about society writ large, defined in opposition to a small set of ostracized would-be insiders, who, bereft of cultural capital and failing to possess nor understand the lifestyle of the intended audience for mainstream material goods, attempt to invert the social value pyramid.

in other words, BIFL'ers are total Redditors, millennial and alienated masculinity to the core. if you identify with that crowd, then perhaps you will find their claims more favorable, but i want to walk you through how i became disillusioned with the promise of "buying it for life".

let's go back to safety razors, those old honks of steel. nobody really uses those things anymore. you know why? first of all, they're made of metal, so they're heavy. they're impractical to travel with, even if you forget about bringing razor blades on a plane. second, they're quite dangerous: despite the name, it's very easy to nick yourself on a safety razor. and third, even if the blades are quite cheap, the handle of a safety razor can run into 50 or 60 dollars

that shit is impractical as fuck!

but impracticality is the name of the game with BIFL. the whole point is contorting what are obviously downsides into virtuous upsides. they're made of metal—QUALITY! they're impractical to travel with—you should have a home setup with a badger hair brush and lather bowl and everything anyway, you aren't supposed to travel with that! they're dangerous—skill issue! of course they're expensive, the point is to buy-it-for-life!

the impetus towards safety razors is less so their material benefits and more their psychological attraction. gillette—big corp—has divorced you from—tradition—masculinity—your money—with marketing, womanly tricks—devilish advertisements. the safety razor is—dangerous, alluringly masculine—without the nanny state safety features of modern shavers—can be owned for life.

why do you need to own a safety razor for life?

why do you need to own a backpack, a watch, a chair, for life?

when things expend their useful lifespan, trash them.

if you travel often you will probably lose your bags at some point. you may need to buy a new razor. would it be better to have lost an expensive, hand-knurled, artisanal safety razor or some piece of shit gillette you can replace at a corner 7/11?

i want to repeat that i view as flawed and false both the material, empirical claims of BIFL as well as its philosophical, psychological undergirding.

it is true that some things are made worse today, but many things today are just better, because we have better science and technology, and the insistence that goods with shorter life spans or more recent manufacturing dates are inherently inferior is short-sighted and deprives people of the fruits of decades of R&D.

a trend some time ago, again in the BIFL community, was towards old-fashioned backpacks, old hiker bag things as from Fjällräven or Topo Designs.

hikers stopped using that old ass shit for good reason! the straps aren't ergonomic, the fabric isn't very resistant to cuts tears and friction, the boxy look is not ergonomic, etc, etc, etc.

is it truly planned obsolescence or do you just have dumb nostalgia?

the truth is that many modern features are actually great! maybe you don't know what all the buttons on your microwave do. should you then buy a GE microwave from the 50s that will never die? no, you should probably read the fucking manual! don't know what kind of detergent to use with your HE washer? read the fucking manual!

what's the point of buying a safety razor for life? yeah there are all these boomers with cool stories about how they still use the same, whatever to shave their coochie or whatever, but why is that something to aspire to?

there is nothing wrong with owning something, getting rid of it because it no longer suits your needs or because you want to upgrade or try something new or any number of reasons. but the BIFL guys would treat it like a cardinal sin.

it should be obvious that buying the most expensive skis you can when you just get into skiing is a bad idea, and the same for cycling or audio or any other hobby for which there is an affordable entry point and an expensive ceiling.

so it should probably also be obvious that most things in your life do not deserve to be the „BIFL“ version of themselves, because (I am speaking to the young men for whom BIFL is most tempting) most of your life is ahead of you.

you ever own one of these fancy ass office chairs? that shit is expensive and heavy as fuck! pain in the ass to fucking move!

a fucking $80 nail clipper? your nails made of zirconium or some shit?

a commitment to buying something "for life" is, in the case of consumer goods, generally a pretty stupid thing. it costs optionality.

when BIFL isn't fetishizing old crappy tech it is overengineering things, which isn't free either. wow oh wow, you use pelican luggage because it's bullet proof and water proof? when the fuck is somebody firing bullets at your check in or hosing it down? be for real, please. wow oh wow, you have cordura on your sling bag? should we tell the FBI to bring out the teflon? these fabrics and metals and designs all have tradeoffs, and just optimizing for the headline number is going to incur tradeoffs in the rest of the system which boosters are somehow blind to because all they care about is, "Beast Mode Sillage".

it is a very american approach to craft, handiwork, products, to focus on the headline number. this is because cultural transmission about such material goods, for a very specific Redditor generation, happened primarily between strangers over text. Not: Video (more things can be explained to you) Not: in person (more calibration to specific workloads and use cases). Instead, forums, with no personal understanding, no tacit knowledge, no context. The media is the message and, for BIFLers, the shopping list.

every outgrowth of the BIFL belief system is just a repetition of the same consumerist claptrap they declaim.

Out: Vogue handbag spreads. In: Carryology bag reviews.
Out: Window shopping. In: Online shopping.
Out: Impulse buying. In: Impulse buying.

what BIFLers want deep down is a Consensus New Shiny. why is justin's website of BIFL goods a list of new goods, new items, new SPECIFIC and DESIGNER goods rather than a description of what makes, say, a good backpack? why does the BIFL community, which insists that it is a good thing that antiquated, difficult to use products require education, refuse to understand the value proposition of contemporary consumer goods and instead valorize some dead industrial designers?

you do not need the herman miller aeron. if you were really BIFL, you would just use the cheapest IKEA chair that worked. the idea of buying nice or buying twice is a way for men to justify luxury purchases.

"a goyard bag is mostly plastic and the cost is mostly signalling value"

Ok, and your fucking $350 pocket knife is not mostly signalling value?

true coffee snobs may benefit from the Stagg EKG electric kettle. everybody else is buying it because it looks like the thing that coffee influencers use and they want that association. same thing for: the rimowa classic cabin; the barbour bedale; the filson 256.

"""Because BIFL culture needs objective-seeming reasons to justify its preferred goods, it elevates easily measurable properties like longevity and materials into universal measures of quality.

And because those properties justify expensive, distinctive purchases, the community can participate in luxury consumption while imagining itself opposed to luxury consumption.

So the deepest irony is:

BIFL claims to liberate you from the consumer treadmill by making each purchase more consequential. Instead, it makes shopping into a hobby, an identity, and a moral philosophy.""" thanks chat

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Daily Timepiece ⌚️

This is the Bulova Frank Lloyd Wright

Time, framed like a house.
Wright’s Robie House turned windows into geometry. Bulova turned that geometry into a watch. Horizontal lines. Layered glass. Prairie light, ticking.
Architecture that keeps the hours.