We Don't Repair, We Replace

On the Culture of Disposability and How It Shapes Our Relationships

“Why don’t we make things like this anymore?” he asked.

Andrea had just run his hand along a beautiful wrought iron faucet, shaped like a lion’s head and weathered in turquoise patina — the kind of object that looked alive in its imperfection.

Lately, I’ve been veering a little bit too far into the Big Brain, “wE liVE in a SOcieTy” stuff, and it’s been nothing short of exhausting for everyone within listening distance. I paused a beat before answering, trying to gauge whether I was about to do the “everything is everything” thing — or if I was actually onto something.

“Well,” I said, “we like uniformity. We like things we can easily replace. We don’t like things that don’t work reliably, that need to be fixed, tended to, or understood through complexity.”

The moment stayed with me all day. Because it’s true — we’ve built a world that prefers replacement over repair. A world that prizes efficiency, sameness, and predictability. We mass produce to eliminate anomalies. We throw things away when they stop serving us the way we expect them to. We trade character for convenience. We call things with small, even inconsequentional variations defective. We also feel a deep and profound emptiness, a wistful knowing that the space once occupied by specialness simply cannot be filled by the particleboard IKEA furniture we’ll leave out on the curb, and replace with a duplicate without feeling a thing.

And that orientation — toward ease and novelty, toward disposability — doesn’t end with the things we own. It seeps into how we live, how we love, and how we relate.

When we lay our hands on something that’s stopped serving us, and choose to see what’s wrong, to mend it, to repair it, we make that thing sacred. Repair is reverence. It’s a declaration that something is still worth tending to. But we live in a culture that tells us the juice ain’t worth the squeeze. That asks, why fix what you can replace?

The same logic shows up in our relationships.
When someone disappoints us or when a bond starts to feel strained, we don’t ask what’s needed here? — we ask what’s next? We leave rather than learn. We chase newness, mistaking it for growth, and call it self-care. But sometimes it’s just another form of consumption — one that keeps us lonely, disconnected, and perpetually searching for the next best thing.

We do this to ourselves, too.
We treat ourselves like products to be optimized — useful, usable, efficient. We polish the parts that are easy to market and neglect the ones that are messier, slower, more difficult to understand. We exile the pieces of ourselves that don’t perform, that aren’t legible or reliable.
We forget that those are often the most human parts of us, the ones that require patience, repair, and gentleness. We forget to remember that we are also broken things.

As a Black, queer, neurodivergent person, I had to go toe to toe with my own disposability early on. I learned quickly, and often brutally, that there was a ceiling on how much of myself I could bring into most rooms. How much truth, texture, or intensity could exist in my relationships, workplaces, and social settings before I crossed some invisible threshold, became “too much,” and was quietly discarded.

The lesson came dressed up as feedback: tone it down, soften it, make it easier to digest. I learned to translate myself into more palatable forms — to sand down the edges, quiet the brilliance, compartmentalize the chaos. The cost of belonging was containment.

And that’s the thing about living in a culture of disposability: it teaches you that your survival depends on self-editing. That the parts of you that take work — the inconvenient, loud, emotional, or nonlinear parts — are liabilities. So you start treating yourself the way the world treats its objects: useful when performing, replaceable when you malfunction.

It took years to realize that this wasn’t a personal failure — it was a systemic one. The same world that designs products to break easily also designs conditions where certain kinds of people are never meant to last. Where difference is tolerated only when it’s profitable, entertaining, or easily contained.

Repairing doesn’t mean tolerating harm or forcing something to work that’s past its time. It means choosing care over convenience. It means asking: Can this be mended in a way that honors its essence? Can this soil still yield life if I tend it differently?

We forget that repair itself is a form of intimacy. It demands attention, curiosity, and humility. It requires us to stay near what’s broken long enough to understand it. To move with tenderness instead of haste.

Because things will always break.
That’s inevitable.

But a huge part of what makes a society, of what makes a person — is what they do with broken things.

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