The Death of Repair

Every civilisation leaves behind its ruins, and ours will be landfills. Strata of cracked screens and single-use plastics, fast fashion and failed gadgets, the bones of a culture that forgot how to mend. Future archaeologists won’t dig for treasure, they’ll sift through fragments of convenience, wondering how a species clever enough to reach the moon couldn’t make a kettle that lasted a decade.

I had this thought because my kitchen tap had been leaking for months. Nothing dramatic, just a little dribble. Enough to irritate me every time I use it, but not enough to climb any higher on the endless list of chores. Buying a replacement would be cheap, but my time isn’t: the twelve YouTube tutorials, the inevitable back-and-forth to Screwfix when the replacement doesn’t come with the right adapter, the various tools I’d need to buy, the quiet fury of discovering it uses a fitting no human has ever heard of. I could, of course, hire someone to fix it in seconds and part with more cash than the tap is worth.

This morning, I pulled out the tap’s extendable hose to fill a watering can and noticed the same pathetic dribble from the neck of the faucet. Out of boredom more than purpose, I fiddled with it, and found a loose nut. One small twist and the leak stopped instantly. Months of irritation, gone in a second.

Once I got over the embarrassment of having ignored the problem for so long, I realised how symbolic it was. Not simply that I hadn’t bothered to fix it, but that I hadn’t expected to. Somewhere along the way, repair stopped feeling like a normal part of ownership and started feeling like eccentricity, a quaint curiosity for people with time to kill, and that wasn’t an accident. It may have started as genuine convenience, but over time manufacturers have discreetly taught us to expect failure, to see breakdown as the natural life cycle of things. The death of repair isn’t a symptom, it’s a design feature.

Repair used to be the cheaper choice, an act of thrift and necessity. Now it’s a luxury, a hobby for people with money and weekends to spare. The knowledge that once saved you money now costs it; the tools and training that once sat in every home are sold back to us as niche expertise. Tailoring your own clothes, bleeding the radiator, changing a punctured tyre, have all drifted from life skill to lifestyle. We have, somehow, managed to commodify competence itself.

Products aren’t disposable because they must be, but because it’s more profitable for them to be. Screws are glued down, batteries sealed in, spare parts discontinued. The local repair shop, once a humble monument to self-sufficiency, can’t survive against a £30 kettle that costs double that to fix. If things lasted, you would buy fewer of them, and in a consumer economy, durability is the enemy.

Now we have entered a strange co-dependence with cheapness. Manufacturers build things to fail; we, in turn, expect them to. Quality feels indulgent, almost naïve. Jumpers that loses their shape after two washes aren’t bad value anymore, it’s just what clothes do. Even our electronics follow the same quiet choreography: planned obsolescence disguised as progress. You don’t upgrade your phone because you crave the new one, you upgrade because the old one mysteriously begins to fail the moment a successor appears.

It’s comforting to think this is about convenience, that we have simply grown too busy or distracted to fix things. But that is a myth we tell ourselves. What has really happened is that we have absorbed disposability into our worldview. We no longer expect our possessions to last, and so we treat them with the same care we expect from them; none at all.

And yet, the impulse to mend remains deeply human. It is patient and intimate and humble. It says, I value this enough to make it whole again. Generations before ours repaired everything, clothes, tools, relationships, because they saw maintenance as a moral act, not a pastime. As well as possibly being a necessity, to fix something was to affirm its worth, and perhaps your own along with it.

That single act, that half-turn of a nut, felt unexpectedly good. Not because I saved money, but because for a moment I interrupted the logic of disposability. I inadvertently refused the hushed surrender that whispers that nothing lasts, so why try.

The death of repair is the story of our times. It isn’t only that we have stopped fixing things; it’s that we have stopped believing things can be fixed. We live amid the wreckage of planned decay, resigned to a world where nothing is built to last and no one has time to care.

So start small. Sew the button. Glue the mug. Tighten the tap. The point isn’t to save money, it’s to remember that caring is the first act of defiance.