27 ms·

We Lost Our Ability to Mend

• dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  It's not about not being able to mend at all, these things are fairly easy to do (or to learn). It's unthinkable anyone would come to work in mended clothes. They would be concerned everyone thinks they're poor and can't afford buying new clothes. As long as there is this social stigma, and clothing brands interest in people buying new pieces of clothing continuously, we can forget about mending.
  • smadge 8y ago
    The article includes a picture of Prince Charles wearing a mended jacket. If it’s acceptable for royalty to appear in public in mended clothing I imagine it’s ok for us plebeians.
    • arkano 8y ago
      It's usually the opposite; people of status / power are allowed to ignore norms that plague the more common folk.
      • taneq 8y ago
        And then six weeks later it's fashionable to have a small patch somewhere prominently placed on your jacket.
      • walshemj 8y ago
        This is the Vimes Boots theory of socio-economic unfairness ;-)
    • bsder 8y ago
      Prince Charles doesn't have to care because he is Prince Charles. It's like casual friday. The CEO can wear shorts and the junior engineer can probably wear shorts. However, you probably won't see the upwardly mobile managers ever wearing shorts without a direct order. Social signalling matters and clothes are part of social signalling.
    • eeZah7Ux 8y ago
      Not really. Countless behaviors are seen as "chic" when done by millionaires and thrashy when done by lower class: owning 2nd hand of flashy clothing, drinking alcohol early, owning a strip of land or a horse, keeping a food garden, doing home repairs...
    • zokier 8y ago
      Prince Charles doesn't need to look sharp to prop up his status, which is solidified in the most formal manner. Neither is the Prince best known for his stylishness.
      • mtts 8y ago
        > Neither is the Prince best known for his stylishness. You'd be surprised. https://www.nowtolove.co.nz/celebrity/royals/prince-charles-gq-best-dressed-list-2019-style-icon-39963 https://www.nowtolove.co.nz/celebrity/royals/prince-charles-...
    • NeedMoreTea 8y ago
      He has, at times, been derided for it in the media, especially at the lower end. At least he's followed his eco beliefs fairly consistently for decades. It would be much easier for him to not bother whilst he's being sent around the globe on official duties.
    • barry-cotter 8y ago
      This model is way too simple. People don’t distinguish themselves between those they don’t deal with. No one’s going to confuse a social worker with the genuinely wealthy, but they could pass for a professional like a doctor or lawyer. Equally they could be mistaken for someone of the class of their clients if they dress like them. The social worker will try to dress like the successful professional. The professional is not going to be mistaken for a poor person. If it happens they’d laugh unconcerned and move on. But they are probably socially exposed to genuinely wealthy people or the extremely professionally successful, businessmen, parliamentarians or congresspeople, executives. They could move into these circles themselves or marry into them. People define themselves by those they could plausibly be mistaken for, not the full range of possible social roles. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/ > Everyone wants to look like they are a member of a higher class than they actually are. But everyone also wants to avoid getting mistaken for a member of a poorer class. So for example, the middle-class wants to look upper-class, but also wants to make sure no one accidentally mistakes them for lower-class. > But there is a limit both to people’s ambition and to their fear. No one has any hopes of getting mistaken for a class two levels higher than their own: a lower-class person may hope to appear middle-class, but their mannerisms, accent, appearance, peer group, and whatever make it permanently impossible for them to appear upper-class. Likewise, a member of the upper-class may worry about being mistaken for middle-class, but there is no way they will ever get mistaken for lower-class, let alone underclass.
  • bartread 8y ago
    > It's unthinkable anyone would come to work in mended clothes. Nailed it. The same is true in many social situations as well (although by no means all - repaired or damaged clothing is absolutely acceptable at gigs for many genres, for example). The problem is not that we can't mend, but that we can't mend seamlessly. We can repair clothes but can't do so in a way that makes them good as new again, which sends an undesirable social signal in many situations.
  • NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    Why is it unthinkable? I do. I wouldn't consider throwing something away I ripped somehow, unless it was also nearing worn out - like all the material was becoming worn or too thin. I might have been sniffy about it in my 20s. Couldn't care less nowadays as it bears no relation to my poverty or not.
    • Freak_NL 8y ago
      Isn't it the other way around? Someone who mends their own clothes looks capable, creative, and economical. Also, elbow patches are trendy. Of course there is a difference between mending otherwise fine clothing and having to go on wearing worn or threadbare clothes, as you rightly point out.
      • gtrfreewifi 8y ago
        People who are confident and strong can definitely pull off mended clothes. On the other hand, it's not wise to hand your children obviously mended stuff if you know that they already struggle socially. Bullies sense the weak ones and attacks based on clothing are common, also in later life (although this phenomenon peaks at school).
    • barry-cotter 8y ago
      It’s about signaling social status. If you dress in cheap clothes but you drive a really nice car no one’s going to think you’re poor. If you wear the exact same clothes and don’t have a car people will make a different guess as to your social status.
      • scarface74 8y ago
        I just took my son to buy his first car on his own. I told my son that if we couldn’t make the numbers work for him, I would just let him take over payments on my car for the next year ($300/month) and I would by myself another car. I guess because of the cheap car I was driving (It is about $15K brand new and I bought it used four years ago) and I showed up in just casual clothes, they thought I was struggling. When they heard I was contemplating buying myself a car instead and I was looking at some of the higher end cars, they kept steering me to the lower cost cars. Not that I would have bought anything from there anyway. I don’t buy new cars.
  • markvdb 8y ago
    Affluence and status signaling using clothing: is there an inverse correlation? Any recommended scientific literature on this? Personal anecdata: * I notice a more relaxed attitude to mended clothes in my native western European country than in my eastern European second home country. * I also noticed a pattern in secondary school. In the economically privileged environment I went to school, kids cared less about clothing brands than at the less afluent schools in the vicinity. * I carry mended clothes to work every now and then.
    • jdietrich 8y ago
      >Affluence and status signaling using clothing: is there an inverse correlation? It's straightforward countersignalling - some people are sufficiently wealthy that the cost of their clothes carry negligible economic signalling value, so they can signify the fact that they're above that level of status game or use their clothes to convey different kinds of status. Nobody would believe that the Prince of Wales can't afford a new suit, so patching a tear in his jacket signals thrift and tradition. The patch in his jacket signals that he is old money, that his status is higher than someone who needs to signal their status through clothing. Distressed jeans are the obvious example of retail-level countersignalling; when you can buy a new pair of jeans for $8 at Walmart, the fact that your jeans aren't ripped at the knee carries very limited signalling value, making the countersignal more accessible. We see the same thing with cycling. The very poor cycle, because they can't afford a car. The very wealthy cycle, because nobody would believe that they can't afford a car and choosing to cycle signals that they could obviously afford to drive but they're conscious of their health or the environment. People in the middle wouldn't be seen dead on a bicycle, because they're not confident of their ability to convey the high-status countersignal rather than the low-status signal. In this example, social capital often substitutes for economic capital; if you're young, bohemian and cosmopolitan, you can more easily convey the countersignal. There's a fairly nuanced meta-signal that says "I have the education and the opportunity needed to be a wealthy professional, but I have made the conscious choice to be an impoverished artist instead". I'd argue that the strong social safety net in western Europe drives more people into countersignalling and meta-signalling behaviour, because base-level signalling of economic security is less necessary. You don't need to signal the fact that you're not desperately poor in a society where very few people are desperately poor, which opens up a wider range of signalling behaviours.
  • ghaff 8y ago
    Really? I'm probably not going to go into the office or on a trip with clothing that has some obvious quick and dirty repair or is in need of one. But I semi-regularly mend or have mended clothing that's missing a button, has a hem that needs to be tacked back in place, etc. Those aren't visible if they're done even half-competently.
    • distances 8y ago
      I definitely have been both to the office and on holidays with self-mended clothes. Especially tears in my favourite shorts I repaired perhaps ten times before giving up on the brittle fabric. I never was worried of stigma of clearly mended clothes; I rather was quite proud of my bohemian clothing. Maybe it helps that we work in software engineering, so it's quite clear to my colleagues that we could buy a new pair of shorts for each and every day? Or maybe it's because of increase in environmental concerns especially with younger urban people? I can't honestly say, as it never occurred to me that it could convey a negative message.
  • walshemj 8y ago
    Well I am going to send my barbour A7 jacket off to be patched didn't rewax it and it dried out when I was in hospital.
• itronitron 8y ago
  There isn't a need to mend when clothes are as inexpensive as they are. Especially for children's clothes as they outgrow them before they need mending and it's easier to buy new clothes than find what you need second hand.
  • BossingAround 8y ago
    This may be the case in the US, but in most of the world, places such as India, China, and even parts of Europe, people still hand down clothing, and have a very real need for mending...
    • Freak_NL 8y ago
      Even parts of Europe? That makes it sound as if this is just something poor Polish country folk do. This is common sense everywhere, including here in the fairly affluent Netherlands! We are expecting our first child, and the amount of second-hand clothing that found its way to us via family is astounding. Children outgrow clothing fast, so even without mending clothing gets reused as a matter of course.
      • BossingAround 8y ago
        By parts of Europe, I meant that this may not be very common in the UK or Germany (no idea about Germany), but is definitely common in large parts of EU (Poland, sure, but also Portugal, and I think it's relatively common among the nordics, for example).
        • benj111 8y ago
          Even in the UK. Parents don't want to just throw out clothes, with their associated memories, so they try and pass them on. We bought 6 months of clothes for our son when he was born, and have barely bought anything since, he's 2 and a half now, and has more foot wear than me.
          • 8y ago
• system2 8y ago
  When I was studying, I used to turn my round neck shirts into V neck by cutting the middle and stitching. Just for fun and it thought me how to stitch, at least to a point. Today it is not about knowing, it is about time. I can't spend 30 minutes fixing my clothes because my 30 minutes is more valuable than a tshirt's cost. Or I don't want to deal with ordering glue for my shoe and work on fixing it, I take it to a shoe repair and get it fixed for $10. Things got more convenient than war times. We don't need to turn potato sack burlap into clothing anymore. Although, I also believe a man should know how to stitch a button if they need to. I want people to repair electronics rather than clothing.
  • charliesome 8y ago
    >I can't spend 30 minutes fixing my clothes because my 30 minutes is more valuable than a tshirt's cost. I think it's a mistake that we value our own time like this. There's satisfaction that can be derived from spending time mending some of your own clothing, and that contributes to wellbeing. That wellbeing is not something that you can put a dollar value on.
    • jplayer01 8y ago
      What if there are other activities that OP considers more valuable and rewarding? Spending time with friends or family? Starting a new business? Working on that programming project? Learning how to play an instrument? Exercising? Meditating? Cooking? I'm not sure such a blanket statement is helpful. This isn't just about money, it's about opportunity cost. The time that he sinks into mending that Tshirt is time he could have put into any other potentially more worthy endeavor.
    • laumars 8y ago
      Platitudes like that often don't work out in practice. Take my life for example; what do you suggest I substitute in return for time spent mending clothes? * Time spent with the family / kids? That contributes far more to my wellbeing (and theirs). Sure I could mend my clothes with the kids but that isn't something they'd enjoy (nor me to be quite honest) and there are already enough chores I make them do as a family. * How about time spent cooking and cleaning? But unfortunately I already pay different people to wash the windows, clean the house, mow the lawn... there isn't much less responsibility I can hand off there. * I guess I could spend less time tinkering with my own hobby projects - but that amounts to very few hours a week and given it's my own personal time, I think I should do what I find more rewarding and relaxing and that isn't mending old clothes. I barely get time in the week to do fun things as it is. I mean stuff like going on bike rides with my eldest son (who's 5) and I certainly don't get any time to look after my own personal health (I used to run 5k several times a week - it's not much but it made a difference. These days I'm lucky if I get one 5k run in a week). So if I can outsource stuff I don't enjoy to someone else for a reasonable fee then my time is most certainly worth it.
• Dowwie 8y ago
  I bought a used three-zone Weber Summit-series barbecue for a really good price. It was well-used. Many of the screws keeping it together were corroded and falling apart. There were a couple of holes in the main cooking box. I repaired and restored the entire grill to a very workable condition with the help of Weber, who sells replacement parts and offers great customer support. Unfortunately, I don't weld, so my solution to patching holes involved washers, nuts, screws, and custom cut sheet metal. Restoring this grill required a few hours of labor and lots of patience. The grill retails for a few thousand dollars. I bought it for less than 10% retail, used and requiring repair. The parts cost less than 100. Many of us value our personal time in a way that rationalizes avoiding a project such as this. However, the cost savings and value created by this project were sufficient to justify the effort. I like to consider this strategic mending..
  • lscotte 8y ago
    I know someone who picked up a stainless gas BBQ free from the curb in front of someone's house. It was in great condition, the burners and grills looked like it had hardly been used. New, it would have been in the $1000-2000 range. What was wrong with it? All it needed was a new AA battery for the ignitor!
    • Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
      My experience with gas BBQs is that the ignitor is usually the first thing to go. Usually, again in my experience, it happens due to corrosion of the ignitor itself. My solution is usually just to use a match, I find that the ignitor stops working so quickly that it's not worth replacing. Replacing the grills, heat spreader, and burners however makes a lot of sense and can make an old BBQ virtually new again.
• titanix2 8y ago
  During undergrad studies I used to wear a jacket with a cross-stitched logo from a game I was playing at the time. It was unbelievable how everyone assumed that it was my mother’s doing. What bothered me was not the thing about the gender stereotype but the fact that putting a string in a needle and using it seems so hard for anyone from teenagers to grown up adult. Sometimes the barriers are just in the mind.
• tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  We were taught this at school, I made a shirt as one of my projects.
• faebi 8y ago
  Every 6 months I used to go to my mother and use her Bernina sewing machine to fix some clothes. The machine is old already but still works good. Recently she bought me a new mechanical one. I really hope it will last all my life. I don't need it much, but it's a pleasure to fix things or make something small. Plus, the use of a powerful machine makes it way more fun than stitching. Also, it still wastes less time than me searching and buying something new.
  • jacquesm 8y ago
    I buy up the really old ones and repair them then give them away. They last a lifetime (literally, these are machines from the 30's to the 70's and it is not rare that the previous owner had it as a wedding gift and passed away). I love the Naumann brand, they are really indestructible, light industrial stuff. There are some intricate bits the trickery required to get the timing just right is at the edge of my patience but when they run it is like music.
  • natch 8y ago
    >Recently she bought me a new mechanical one. As opposed to a non-mechanical sewing machine? What does this mean? Guessing you mean one with metal gears unlike the plastic-geared junk sold new in most stores now?
    • faebi 8y ago
      The last "mechanical" one of Bernina: https://www.bernina.com/en-US/Products-US/BERNINA-products/Sewing-Quilting-and-Embroidery/BERNINA-Classic-Series/BERNINA-1008 https://www.bernina.com/en-US/Products-US/BERNINA-products/S... From what I know there is just less logic and software inside. Whenever I change the style of stitching, I can hear some mechanical clicking inside of it. So I assume there is no fancy logic inside. Just pure mechanical switches and an engine.
• rwl 8y ago
  In this context, it seems worth mentioning Woolfiller, a product I love because I always wear out the elbows in my wool sweaters and it lets me mend them: https://www.woolfiller.com/ https://www.woolfiller.com/ It's a great example of a company trying to reverse this trend. I recently ordered a new kit from them, and learned that they are working on a new project to produce a more mendable fabric: https://madetomend.com/ https://madetomend.com/ I can't wait until I can buy a jacket from them and try it out.
• FailMore 8y ago
  Today, all things are too cheap. We need include the cost on the environment within the cost of our goods. Altering the price of goods is an extremely important mechanic to move us towards sustainability. It is ok for us to have fast fashion if it can be done in a non damaging way, if it cannot then we will have to learn to mend again.
  • bamboozled 8y ago
    Well said, I would say the same goes for food, the monetary cost is way too low and the environmental damage is way too high.
    • mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
      Some people can not afford food. I grew up in a single parent household, 2 boys who ate like horses. My poor mother could not keep up feeding us working her $12/hr job. We ate food from a store where products go before they go to trash (I believe).
  • lscotte 8y ago
    That is an absolutely terrible idea.
  • specialist 8y ago
    re: environmentalism & "fast fashion" There's an opportunity in there somewhere. What if clothing were made to order locally? I've been pitching the idea to any one who will listen. Many makerspaces already have stuff for textiles. Kids these are really into cosplay, crafts, homemade. Outside of a few STEM hubs, there's excess warehouse space AND untapped labor. Etc. The pendulum swings back.
    • Falkon1313 8y ago
      While a child labor force sweating away over textiles in a rundown warehouse may be a classic business model, it could be a difficult idea to pitch nowadays.
• lazyjones 8y ago
  I'm old enough to know how to mend, but surely even younger people could just watch one of countless Youtube tutorials if they suddenly decided they'd like to learn this? Knowledge is more accessible than ever before, nowadays we just "know where to look" whereas previous generations knew what they were taught (or, sometimes, learnt from books). The real issue seems to be that people are helpless without the Internet - and that our consumerism has brought a throwaway mentality with it.
  • mbrock 8y ago
    I grew up in a way that didn’t involve learning traditional skills from my parents. That seems almost antiquated although I’m sure some people my age did have it like that. Divorced parents, not so much time spent with grandparents. Mom didn’t have a lot of need for mending, etc. There was no war, affordable stuff was plentiful enough. Many people my age describe this kind of rupture in the passing down of skills. But we are also quite resourceful and it’s like we are teaching ourselves to be different as we grow up into parental age. We also have a sense that life might be getting more difficult when we project decades ahead, so we want to resurrect some of this lost knowledge.
    • thaumasiotes 8y ago
      > Mom didn’t have a lot of need for mending, etc. There was no war, affordable stuff was plentiful enough. Many people my age describe this kind of rupture in the passing down of skills. My mother made our Halloween costumes by hand. We didn't (and don't) really mend clothes, but the skill set is the same. And when I had a shirt fail by coming apart at a seam, rather than having a hole worn through the fabric, my reaction was that I should sew it back together. Mending a seam is invisible. Mending a hole will give you a visible patch; I think there are good reasons people don't do that. And far and away the most common failure in my clothes is wearing a hole in the knee of a pair of pants.
      • scotty79 8y ago
        > And far and away the most common failure in my clothes is wearing a hole in the knee of a pair of pants. Which might be considered stylish and left alone as it is.
• joostdecock 8y ago
  It's not every day my worlds collide like this, so I'll plug https://freesewing.org/ https://freesewing.org/ for those of you who have an interest in making clothes and are looking for a place to start that is a good match for the hackernews crowd. Full disclosure: I'm the freesewing maintainer
  • gpm 8y ago
    That's a cool site! You might want to redirect http:// http:// to https:// https:// right now if I type "freesewing.org" into my browser it heads to a "Apache2 Debian Default Page".
    • joostdecock 8y ago
      Thanks for the heads-up, I had no idea. I'll fix it ASAP.
  • justinclift 8y ago
    Looking through the website... is there a link to the Patreon account? All of the Patreon links so far just seem to be hugely overboard "sign up" ones, with nothing linking to the actual account. Guessing I didn't spot something obvious? :)
    • joostdecock 8y ago
      We don't use patreon. Patrons can subscribe directly through PayPal. We don't need the Patreon approach because everything on the site is available for free. Being a patron is completely optional. The reason why you need an account is explained in the FAQ on our new beta site: https://beta.freesewing.org/en/docs/faq https://beta.freesewing.org/en/docs/faq It boils down to the fact that all are patterns are made-to-measure. So we need your measurements, thus we need a way to store them. That's why a (free) account is needed. There's no catch.
• dade_ 8y ago
  Nothing wrong with specialization. It's a waste of my time and potentially a waste of money if I ruin the item. There are many shops in town, some excellent at mending and alterations and at very reasonable cost. For that, I get excellent quality work that will hold up instead of me ruining the garment through inexperience. I'll stick to my soldering iron, they can keep their thread and needle.
• sokoloff 8y ago
  A friend was recently complaining about having to buy a new $2000 fridge, how his old one only lasted 8 years, and how everything is junk nowadays. He described the symptoms to me [gradual loss of cooling capability, soft ice cream, then melting ice cubes] and I told him I solved the same problem 2 years ago and his was almost surely a broken defrost heater leading to a totally iced up [therefore no airflow] cooling unit, that troubleshooting would take him 15 minutes to confirm, and if that was it, it was a $20 90-minute repair (most of which is waiting for the freezer to defrost). He looked at me like I had 3 heads to even consider a fridge repair and a week or so later sent me a pic of his new, $2000 fridge in place. I tried.
  • mc32 8y ago
    Similarly resuscitated a washing machine twice with 10 and $20 dollar parts. Hardest thing was getting sheet metal back in place as it tends to contort and warp. YouTube and specialized forums are very helpful in pinning the issue and parts. Even, some years years back (10 or so?) when buying a woolen pullover you’d get a bit of mending yarn wrapped around cardboard bobbins with the exact same color as your sweater. Nowadays they’re not included, at least where I buy.
    • tjr225 8y ago
      YouTube is a modern marvel. If you can use YouTube and can get your hands on the right tools you can fix almost anything.
      • LeonB 8y ago
        Strong agree. YouTube creates so much value around repairs. I can fix all sorts of things with my pool thanks to YouTube. And everyone I know has learned tiny practical skills of one sort or another from there.
      • quickthrower2 8y ago
        I followed a youtube to take out an lcd panel from a laptop to replace. The panel is cracked in the corner and the whole picture if fuzzy. It was easy enough and that then gave me the confidence to order a new one, which is in the mail as I speak. Cost is circa 15% of the new laptop price.
• purplezooey 8y ago
  I can say with certainty that none of my clothes are talismanic.
• zeroname 8y ago
  > "We lost the ability to mend" No we haven't. If you need to sew on a button and you can't figure out how to do it from looking at a piece of thread, a needle, and the other buttons, then go spend fifteen minutes on a Youtube tutorial. It's easy. If the task is more complicated any you really like the piece, consider the fact that in terms of opportunity cost, it's almost certainly cheaper for you to send the piece across the country (or the globe) and back than having it fixed by yourself.
  • JJMcJ 8y ago
    Mentioned this in another reply but for buttons put something like a toothpick between button and garment when sewing it on, so that there is some flex when buttoning up. Otherwise it's too easy to have button fastened tight against the garment and hard to manipulate.
• baybal2 8y ago
  > The two biggest blows came in the 1990s. The first was the shift in the US economy from manufacturing to knowledge-intensive services (a shift that has been in the making for a long time, but came to a head during the information technology revolution). People call it "knowledge based economy," but one of my previous bosses had that phrase about it "it feels more like it is an ignorance based economy" And yes, the service economy is there to accommodate living of very one sided people, in regards to both work and life skills. The amount of money spent in service economy is seemingly directly proportional to at what cost intellectual ineptness comes to money earning classes of society: branding consulting, financial consulting, management consulting, "change management" - really all that stuff is available to any able minded person if he can give 5 minutes of serious thought to that. I do believe that most of HN readers have hard time understanding people buying into that stuff too. I wonder, if I would've been a multibillionaire, would I be also paying millions to random consultants to do 2+2 things for me?
• mrob 8y ago
  If you wear belts, you might decide you don't need to repair the button because the belt hides it, and duplicates its function of holding the pants up. This will eventually result in the zipper breaking, which cannot be hidden with a belt, and is much more difficult to repair. The button has the additional non-obvious function of reducing load on the zipper, so you should repair it even if it looks unnecessary.
• Farradfahren 8y ago
  I dont know why but it gives you massive pride, to remove planned obsolescence from a very cheap item. Take the water heater of my mum - the toplid did no longer work, because the axis it used was made from cheap plastic, resting on even thinner plastic holders. Solution: Hot screw driven through. Now this cheap item works trouble free since 5 years. Same thing with a fancy looking scale- the wires internal where glued together with a sort of ducttape. Two solder points later - meet the eternal scale. I sometimes wonder, why this is not a buisness model. There must be money in making cheap items ever lasting.
  • ghaff 8y ago
    I'd be willing to bet that the failure points you found are far from the only places in the design where they cheaped out. People tend to buy based on price and/or superficial details. It's hard to sell people on substantially hardened designs absent a brand that allows for charging a real premium.
  • hopler 8y ago
    Am I going to pay you $100 to come fix my scale, or am I going to buy 10 scales? Manufacturing is cheap. Labor is expensive. wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
    • scotty79 8y ago
      Repair is custom job. Custom jobs are expensive.
  • hoorayimhelping 8y ago
    >I sometimes wonder, why this is not a buisness model. There must be money in making cheap items ever lasting. It is, and it's wide out in the open. I bet the high end water heater with a solid reputation for quality would have proper hinges and insulation. It's just that most people are wary of paying a premium for what they perceive to be the same item.
  • stevehawk 8y ago
    Thanks to the Internet everyone thinks engineering and manufacturing is all about "planned obsolescence". Consumers want to blame the maker for the cheap product they bought instead of blaming themselves for only wanting cheap products.
• _Microft 8y ago
  The teeth of a zipper on my backpack came detached from the tape material on the side of the zipper and a friend said that it looks like I would have to get a new backpack. Well... it turned out that the teeth of the zipper are just a plastic string wrapped around a cord (and both still perfectly fine) and that stitching the cord back onto the tape material required not much more than some dexterity and accuracy. It took maybe half an hour from diagnose to the finished fixed zipper. Bonus: feels empowering to do things that someone else considered impossible.
  • ghaff 8y ago
    I had a zipper go recently in a way where the whole zipper did need replaced. I was annoyed to learn that at least my local REIs don't do repairs any longer like they did in the past. I'd have sent it out for repair to a company that specializes in outdoor gear repair but a friend of mine was able to do it for me. (I don't have a sewing machine myself and this really needed one.)
    • mdorazio 8y ago
      FYI in the future there might be a "luggage repair" place in your area that could do this work for you. Had the same thing happen to a backpack I really like and paid $50 to get the zipper replaced and a couple seams reinforced instead of buying a new one.
      • ghaff 8y ago
        Never thought of that and I've even had luggage repaired. As I said in another comment, a cobbler could probably have done it as well though I'd probably have had to order the zipper myself in that case. I think with outdoor gear, there's actually a certain cachet to gear that's obviously well-used and battle-scarred :-)
  • DJBunnies 8y ago
    I feel like there is a difference here between impossible and not worth the time/effort and still be left with a janky bag.
• robohoe 8y ago
  I was just talking to my wife about this yesterday. My gloves wore out on the index fingers and I had to mend them with a needle and thread. Literally 5 minutes of work and gloves are good to go. I then commented on how as Americans lost our way with mending old things and she said why I just didn’t buy new ones. I wonder how future generations will fare while having grown up with disposable material things.
• Sutanreyu 8y ago
  Somewhat ironic this comes in a day after I sewed a hole in the armpit of a tee shirt I like. Doesn't really vibe with the target audience of a site like 'Hacker News'...
  • gtrfreewifi 8y ago
    Hacking essentially means the exact opposite of buying and throwing away stuff (a cycle known as consumerism i.e. being a sheeple). Fixing and modifying all kind of things to suit your weird imagination is the core idea of hacking. The skill of mending applies to software too, of course.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• newman8r 8y ago
  reminds me of some of my favorite quotable lines from Brave New World "ending is better than mending" and "the more stitches the less riches"
• specialp 8y ago
  I have a good paying job, yet I 100% will pick up major appliances or lawn mowers from the garbage if they are somewhat recent with no shame. It is very rare that they have some issue that is worth discarding over. I get tons of junk mail and behind a doctor's office they threw out a $1700 heavy duty paper shredder. It turned out to be a dead hall field sensor to detect when it jams. $25 from fellowes.
  • tartoran 8y ago
    That's cool but watch out for hoarding. While I agree with picking up discarded fixable or like new appliances, there are so many of them out there that one may end up hoarding.
    • syntheticnature 8y ago
      My wife learned that youth shelters/foster parenting agencies need suitcases to help the children move their clothing and stuff around. The usual alternative children get: garbage bags. We collected up suitcases off the curb that in theory need minor mending (no smells, certain problems left behind), and over time the backlog has built up. Time is also an ingredient, here; in the best case it takes fifteen minutes to prep a curb suitcase, in the worst (cleaning stains, etc.) the suitcase might need to sit around in a ventilated area for days over the course of treatment.
      • kuhhk 8y ago
        That's fantastic, I hadn't thought of this. I'm going to keep an eye out for curb suitcases now. Thanks for sharing
      • Wowfunhappy 8y ago
        Do you never wonder about stuff like bed bugs when you pick up stuff like suitcases off the street? I feel like I'm overly paranoid about that.
        • SECProto 8y ago
• krob 8y ago
  We haven't lost our ability to mend. What has happened is people used to rely on material way back in the past to teach them how to mend. Today our products are constantly being upgraded / changes in real time. Those tutorials are often for specific types of products and those products now have radically different electronics and people when they see different products don't understand that the patterns in designing them are functionally identical. The circuit boards on the other hand might be slightly different. Long story short, if you want your stuff to last longer, stop buying into features, buy simple stuff. Simple works longer because it has less things to break. When the simple stuff does break, it's easier to figure out how to fix it. Also I used to have DIY books which would have diagrams to help you fix things. Today all of those diagrams are worthless. Nobody has a rotary telephone anymore. No one has washing machines without circuit boards anymore. Even toilets have different flushing mechanisms, and if you don't know which one you have, you get worried you can't replace the original. Repairing VCR -- give me a break -- or a TV? I think the mending culture needs to start teaching people how electronics work, and then people will start to see the errors of their ways.
  • LeifCarrotson 8y ago
    > What has happened is people used to rely on material way back in the past to teach them how to mend. Today our products are constantly being upgraded / changes in real time. When I was a kid, my Dad and I rebuilt a 1945 Ford 9N tractor from the ground up, including a complete engine teardown. Pistons, rings, valves, carburetor, distributor, points, plugs, the whole shebang. He'd undertaken a similar project in the 70s with his father, and it had served him well, allowing him to do his own maintenance on his used cars, keeping his TCO extremely low. They never had to worry about a car payment, and considered a lease to be for suckers. Now, though, my car is somewhat more reliable but also hugely more complex. When something goes wrong, I don't need to remove a casting and clean some passage, I need my oscilloscope and some eBay spelunking for the dealer's computer manual. It used to be reasonable for a home mechanic to be able to keep up with trends in auto manufacturing and be competent at every task they needed to do. Now I'm not sure a professional can keep up, without specializing. Likewise, I'm an EE, and could probably repair a VCR -certainly done a few stereo recievers in my day. But when my dad (as mentioned above, of the repair mindset) sent me a picture of the PCB from a $30 kitchen appliance, showing an epoxied flip-chip controller and LCD zebra connector, I walked him through checking the batteries and that was reasonably all we could do to fix it. Knowing how to do electronics manufacturing profitably at scale is at cross paths with repairing those electronics.
• Timothycquinn 8y ago
  I just finished tuning up a White sewing machine and it blew me away how well built the thing was. Very well used but still works like a charm. 99.9% metal and made in Japan.
• nkozyra 8y ago
  The other side of the coin is seeing someone identify an "easy fix," have to spend hours reading about it, buying tools to accomplish it and having to do it several times and maybe never get it quite right. I've seen this many times. Sometimes the right answer is: get an expert to look at it. You don't need a $2000 fridge, but you may need a $200 repair job to get it done fast and right.
  • segmondy 8y ago
    Tools have an upfront cost, but they pay for themselves down the line. The first time you start fixing things it might take longer, but as time goes on you get better. You can learn so much by reading repair manuals & books, watching youtube videos, and being able to recognize patterns in other things you have repaired. Doing this will save you tens of thousands of dollars over the years. Furnace, A/C, House appliances, Home repairs, Furnitures, Cars, computers, even clothes & shoes...
    • tcbawo 8y ago
      I think my comment to the parent post also applies here. I love to learn things and home repair is no exception. A lot of it is a skill that requires practice, though. Even if I don't end up doing the work (and I try to), at least I'll be less likely to get ripped off.
    • fao_ 8y ago
      While this is true, it assumes that you not only have enough disposable income to waste on tools, but also that you are free enough from stress and have enough time to be able to do these things.
      • switchbak 8y ago
        "waste" seems a bit dismissive. When I was a poor student the only way I could keep my old cheap things working was to fix them myself. Often a tool can cost less than getting it repaired, paying for itself in one go. And there's many things that are straightforward to fix (bikes for example). It also takes time to arrange a repair, go there, drop it off, pick it up, realize they didn't fix the problem, do it again, etc. I often find doing this stuff myself can actually save time, and if things break on a weekend/holiday you can still salvage your plans.
• aeharding 8y ago
  I got a late '70s blue Singer 20U recently for parachute rigging. But I've become interested in sewing and repairing other things (like work bags) more recently. It's fun to learn. These old sewing machines are amazingly easy to repair and adjust. The manuals are wonderful, too! It's my prized possession. It will definitely outlive me.
• mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  So odd how not even a few hours ago my wife went through my closet and made me throw away old clothes. I had this jacket I’ve worn over 10 years that to me still looked nice, but she insisted it looked worn. The jacket had sentimental value to just from all the places I wore it and the memories I had with it. This wasn’t the first time she made me part with an item dear to me. I had a Hollister t-shirt I wore as a teen - the same one the day we met. Some 18 years later the shirt was still in my closet, ripped and washed out, practically a rag but it had so much sentimental value that I thought about keeping it forever. Nope, she insisted it be gone. This article made me think about my shirt and my jacket. I know they are just items but I’m not sure if I’ll ever get over losing them.
  • gtrfreewifi 8y ago
    Sorry, but your wife sounds like an absolute b*tch.
    • sctb 8y ago
      Posting like this will get your account hastily banned. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      • gtrfreewifi 8y ago
        If posting the truth will get me banned, it's an honour. Nobody likes pretenders or wifes who clearly abuse their significant others, and enabling narcisstist behaviour like that in any way is pretty despicable.
• bluedino 8y ago
  There are opportunities in recycled parts or junkyards for consumer devices. You can pick up a “broken” appliance on the side of the road and test the individual parts and sell them online to people who are looking to repair their own devices.
• AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  It's weird. We live in an age where many of us carry a device in our pockets capable of searching a vast store of human knowledge and presenting results to us nigh-instantaneously. If I have a problem with anything, even if I have no idea how it works, I can usually acquire enough knowledge about it under an hour to diagnose and repair it or at least determine that that I'm not going to be able to do that. I don't know, maybe I just came from a different background. Hacker by nature, grew up poor enough that fixing things was how it was done, have a genetic predisposition against waste, whatever.
  • elorant 8y ago
    You have to have a certain mentality to go down this path. Most people don't like messing with things and getting their hands dirty, even it costs them a fortune to replace a device. It's not because they're stupid. They rather think that it's too complicated to try anything and they're afraid they might make things even worse than they already are. Also, quite often they don't have the necessary tools and buying them and learning to use them is a task on its own. One other thing that strikes me as odd is that most people aren't curious to learn how their everyday devices work. As long as it works it's fine by them. I from the other hand need to know even how the toilette flush works because I find the learning process fascinating. I guess it all boils down to how curious one is.
    • isoskeles 8y ago
      > they're afraid they might make things even worse than they already are I get this, but I also think that if you're willing to spend $2000 to replace a refrigerator, per the example, it's not like you can make the situation much worst. I suppose they might think that they can harm themselves in the process, that's possible. Personally, I might only be okay with futzing around with a refrigerator because I've done it with other (smaller, seemingly less harmful) things in the past.
      • elorant 8y ago
        I think they make the correlation between cost and complication, thus assuming that it will be too much of a trouble to fix it. Let's not forget that we live in an era where free time becomes a luxury. Someone may think that spending 20-30 hours to learn a few things about a refrigerator and locating the problem might be a waste of precious time. If you don't have an intrinsic curiosity on how things work then fixing broken devices might seem like too much of a trouble without any clear benefits.
• lmilcin 8y ago
  I grew up on a farm in a communist country. I still feel my life was much more interesting back then. We were poor but, paradoxically, we ate better than I eat now. The tasks had much more variety to them, there was a lot of interesting stuff happening every day and requiring your attention. There was new thing to be done/fixed all the time and I would never get bored. We would be doing everything for ourselves no matter how unskilled we were in the task, you had to figure it out while you were doing it. There was plenty of variety between seasons and there was plenty of free time to spend with the family. I like my current job and it pays very well but I feel my daytime consists of only work and entertainment. There is almost no variety to it and during 3-4 weeks of vacation I have annually I feel like I have no idea what to do with the time to truly recharge my batteries.
  • virgilp 8y ago
    There is a joke popular in communist countries: > Two old men are talking. "Ah, life was so much better during Stalin's rule!". "Are you mad? We barely had anything to eat, and they were randomly killing people, we lived in constant fear!". "Yes, but we were young...." I feel this is the same - your nostalgia is saying more about you than about the times/the society. I also grew up in a communist country, and I don't feel there's much that we lost by getting rid of them - you could easily choose to live that very same lifestyle now, but (I speculate) you don't because you know deep inside that you and your family would hate it.
  • decebalus1 8y ago
    This is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection. I also grew up in a communist country. I also remember good times. I don't miss it, except for the sense of community in the face of adversity. You can still have that now if you look past the consumer culture.
• Wowfunhappy 8y ago
  It's a real shame "Home Economics" education has been inherently linked to outdated gender roles in the public consciousness. As a guy, it would be nice if a class in high school had forced me to learn to sow. Teach it to people of all genders.
  • duado 8y ago
    Everyone in my school took cooking in 7th grade. As a result I cook a thousand times better than my wife. Compound interest.
  • will_pseudonym 8y ago
    Just a friendly FYI, "sow" means to plant a seed, or an adult female pig/other animals (pronounced like "now"). "Sew" means to "join, fasten, or repair (something) by making stitches with a needle and thread or a sewing machine."
    • ghaff 8y ago
      No that a little bit of gardening would be a bad idea either :-) There are tradeoffs certainly but I've come to believe that high school should have a track that covers, for lack of a better term, "adulting." Cooking, sewing, shop, personal finance, statistics, etc. And most of those can be mixed in with more academic subjects. I've done machine shop stuff at research universities and I've taken a Harvard MOOC on food science.
      • will_pseudonym 8y ago
        I definitely agree. I learned how to sew as a kid for example from my mom, but I sort of dropped it after I realized it wasn't "something that boys do" at the time. All of those functional skills would be so much more useful than a lot of things I was taught in school. There are "adulting" classes now that demonstrate the obvious gap in our education system. [0] Fortunately, the generation that was born with YouTube will be a lot better off, because the amount of things you can learn to do from watching YouTube videos by experienced people is astounding. [0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/adulting-classes-teach-millennials-basic-skills-like-sewing-cooking-and-how-to-deal-with-relationships/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/adulting-classes-teach-millenni...
• mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  From the title I was hoping it would be about self-healing and mental health recovery in the face of dysfunctional modern workplace environments like open plan offices. As with many things (like clothing in the article) we’ve also lost our ability to mentally heal from the damage that repeated exposure to modern workplace cultures inflicts on us.
• dre85 8y ago
  I cracked the screen on my Samsung tablet. The local repair shops wanted more than 200$to fix which is essentially the same price as that tablet brand new. I bought a kit on Ebay and fixed it myself for 30$ and 30 minutes.
• Isamu 8y ago
  What’s this “we stuff?
• Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
  The article talks about clothing, but there's so much more that we've lost the ability to fix. A trick I picked up at my last job was to use Rubber Renue[0] (one bottle will last virtually forever since you need so little) on the pickup rollers on laser printers when they started having paper pickup problems. Works like a charm, but that stuff is nasty. I also learned the delicate art of using a screwdriver to scrape toner deposits off of the fuser. In both cases, these are parts that are easily replaceable because the printers were designed to be maintained, but tight budgets made repairing the parts necessary. Ironically, the deposits on the fuser were due to budgets that necessitated buying cheap knockoff toner. I still use the Rubber Renue on my 12-year-old printer at home. My girlfriend's reaction to my printer jamming was "It's time to buy a new printer!", which horrified me because the problem is so minor and so easy to fix. We do want a colour printer though, so I've been researching to find one that's maintainable instead of disposable. So far the laser printers from the usual suspects (Brother, HP) look like they haven't been affected by the same disposable mentality that inkjet printers have. [0] https://www.mgchemicals.com/products/cleaning-products-for-electronics/cleaners/specialty-cleaners/rubber-renue-408a-408b https://www.mgchemicals.com/products/cleaning-products-for-e...
  • pergadad 8y ago
    For printers I've learned to look beyond the known brands. OKI seems to be focused on the professional market but has some very great value home printers. Big & clunky but can do a lot and look very solid.
    • Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
      OKI showed up during my research, but I didn't mention them since they're a relative unknown to me. They have some printers that tick all the boxes though, so they're certainly in the running.
    • aidenn0 8y ago
      I had an OKI printer in the late 80s and that thing was bulletproof. I dropped it down a flight of stairs while moving it once and it just needed some minor alignment adjustment to work again. Glad to hear they still make good stuff.
• breatheoften 8y ago
  I recently bought a new backpack — it was a supposedly nice name brand backpack and pricey — 300 dollars or so. I didn’t like it — it’s dofficult to pack for the loads I carry and just very far from my optimal design. I randomly came across a backpack in a used gear store in the mountains in Colorado, being sold on consignment — it was ancient, clearly a bag that had seen a lot of use with several patches. It’s a huge u-zip backpack with quality padding, good hip/chest straps, three (useful!) fully exterior zip pockets — two clearly well suited for water/coffee, and nothing dangly. Intrigued by this packs design, so different from all the clone backpacking bags on the market now - I bought it used for 20 dollars. This is the best backpack I’ve ever owned! I use it as a rock climbing day pack and for longer trips with air travel - I can fit everything I need in it for multi month climbing trips to Europe. But it’s clearly very old. I packed too much weight into it and accidentally tried to pick it up once while accidentally standing on the hip strap — putting an enormous strain on the shoulder strap — which broke. This made for an unpleasant train journey in Wales until I arrived at my destination but fortunately I wasn’t too far off. And also fortunately would be staying there for several months so didn’t really need the bag for awhile. During that time I went on a long fruitless search across the internet and brick and mortar stores to find a replacement. I searched everywhere and could not find a backpack that offered even a quarter of the joy I get from this old packs design ... Fortunately — it turns out that mending expertise still exists in some part of the world and smallish town Wales is one such place. A friend suggested I check out a tailor to see if they could fix my broken backpack strap. Long story short — 13 pounds later — they did it!! I also asked them to reinforce the other strap. Result: I couldn’t be happier. The love and admiration I now have for this tailor is substantial. Fixing things is still possible — and fixing that are worth fixing is enormously valuable. Honestly I feel guilty to only have paid 13 pounds for the work of that expert seamstress - in the future I would pay 300 dollars to keep this bag going if I could rather than buying a new bag that is not fit for purpose from day one ...
  • deanclatworthy 8y ago
    I recently invested [1] in a leather backpack, that's hand-made here in Finland. These things are built to last and I expect to get far more lifetime out of it than any of the lightweight crap I've bought from major-brands in the past. I've generally had poor experiences when dealing with clothing/equipment manufacturer warranties. Some claim lifetime warranties, then don't stock parts for repairs. Others will just say they can't help after a year or two. A lot of modern products aren't designed to last. [1] https://kasperi.net/shop/backpacks/fold-top https://kasperi.net/shop/backpacks/fold-top
• crazygringo 8y ago
  Five years ago, a friend convinced me to start buying $250+ raw denim jeans instead of $30 regular jeans (which would wear out every 6 months). I thought it was crazy but he swore by them so I tried it. They were thick, stiff and uncomfortable at first, but after a couple months had transformed themselves into my favorite thing ever as they "wore in". After a year of everyday wear they start developing holes. But they're far too expensive to throw away, so first I took them to the local "denim surgeon", but then realized I could learn to darn them myself. I bought myself the cheapest Singer sewing machine, a darning attachment, and specialty denim thread, and in the past 4 years have probably darned 30 holes across 3 pair, also reinforcing button holes and pocket edges. They look great and unique and are completely "me". I have no doubt the jeans will last me for another 10 years at least, and will turn out to have saved me money in the long run (crazy!). It's very satisfying to have things you care for, that aren't disposable, and are worth the effort of maintaining. But really, the only clothing items for men that seem to be constructed with enough quality in the first place to be worth maintaining are things like raw denim jeans, leather boots (e.g. Red Wings) and quality leather jackets.
  • ghaff 8y ago
    I'd probably add sweaters to the list. They can develop holes, pulled threads, etc. that can be darned or, for casual use, patched. I've also had dress jackets repaired--usually because the lining has torn or something along those lines. I also repaired or had repaired outdoor gear of various types. That's mostly about functionality so the repairs don't need to look great.
  • tomohawk 8y ago
    Speaking of sewing machines, while you can always get an inexpensive Brother, sewing machines today have a lot of plastic gears and other parts that do not last. Some of the best and affordable machines out there are the Singer 301s, which were made back in the 50s. They're bullet proof and repairable. You can do a lot with a straight stitch machine, and a single use machine like that will outperform any multi-stitch machine by a long way. It's a shame that a lot of people come across these and think they're junk because they're not computerized.
• sandyhatches 8y ago
  This has been one of my favorite things about the 9 months I've spent this last year in western Europe and Asia. Everything is mended and fixed, both in shops and by day-to-day individuals. Love it.
• tomohawk 8y ago
  "... to legitimize the housework that women were already performing ..." Yeesh! Is there really something 'illegitimate' about housework? Such a ridiculous tone. All work is important and should be done well and with pride. A person is not less than or "in a ghetto" if their contribution to a family is taking care of most of the housework. I'm a guy and I remember taking Home Ec and Shop, and then those being phased out. All students were expected to take both, and I remember learning a lot there. I suppose its much more important to learn about "Catcher in the Rye".
  • allenu 8y ago
    I don't think the author was implying a value judgment here but stating that the introduction of Home Ec was to help legitimize women's home duties in the eyes of students who may have looked down on them as "not real work".
• foxhop 8y ago
  I fixed my refrigerator that came with my new house. The fan that blows cold air from bottom freezer to top of refrigerator was broken (and even missing blades?). I found the part on the Internet and also took the time to by myself a soldering iron. https://twitter.com/RussellBal/status/650091457303453696 https://twitter.com/RussellBal/status/650091457303453696
• foxhop 8y ago
  We also lost the ability to grow our own food.
• JJMcJ 8y ago
  Hmm - I can sew on a button, and mend a seam. The seam is an emergency repair and looks awful. Button work is OK. My mom gave me the idea to put something, like a toothpick, between button and garment, so the button has some flexibility when you put it in button hole.
• rdiddly 8y ago
  Anyone remember the "bad capacitor epidemic" of the oughts? I've never been Mr. Electronics Guy, but I taught myself how to buy and replace caps and brought back several items from the dead. Got a free computer monitor for the price of bus fare to pick it up from someone offering it on Freecycle, plus whatever, a buck or two for a full set of caps? This was when I was unemployed and the time/money ratio was worth it...
  • fein 8y ago
    Sometimes it does a weird horseshoe and becomes a time/ hobby ration that is worth it even with your day job. I fix stuff because its fun and frugal, and currently have an ongoing classic car project which is fun but not so frugal. These things serve as a nice mental break from coding all day, everyday.
    • rdiddly 8y ago
      Definitely - the challenge and variety were always part of the appeal. Maybe it's partly that (and not just the fact that I'm employed now) that explains why I have yet another "bad caps" project sitting within reach of me right now that's been there for 2-3 years and I haven't even touched it! Thanks to previous efforts, I have all the tools & know-how. I've done it several times. It should be a total breeze, and uneventful. But what fun is that? :) Clearly I am mentally ill.
• Krykunenko 8y ago
  We always forget that jeans were designed for workers. Then they turned into a whole culture. It is not clear why some create a real cult of some things?!
• pkamb 8y ago
  Easily my favorite blog/follow of the last couple years is this guy in Montreal who posts all the quality old junk that people throw away: https://garbagefinds.com/ https://garbagefinds.com/ https://www.instagram.com/garbagefinds https://www.instagram.com/garbagefinds
• hilbert42 8y ago
  I'm very surprised and pleased at both the number of responses and the actual content of those responses (given it was posted on Hacker News). It tells me several things, first that people are actually concerned by the waste created by our throwaway society especially so when the items being thrown away are otherwise serviceable except for minor faults, and second there's still an interest in craft—people (some at least) still want to work with their hands. Recently, this has come to the fore with movements such as those pushing the Right to Repair hi-tech proprietary items such as iPhones and John Deere tractor electronics, etc. I wholeheartedly support these movements, for as a society I reckon we need to relearn how to get our hands 'dirty' by doing physical tradie-like things from time to time. No pun intended but there are many threads to this topic so it's hard to know where to begin or how to paraphrase/limit my comments to a reasonable size. Let's start with life skills and a quote from the article: 'There was once a time when every American child was formally taught the basics of living'. Whilst I understand and agree with the reasons given in the article why most of us seem to have lost many basic life skills, I cannot quite fathom how we let the situation degenerate to such an extent. Surely basic life skills are more than important, they are in fact very important. Why? Well there are many reasons why one should become reasonably proficient at acquiring them and do so at an early age as is possible. Essentially it boils down to one's need to be resourceful, especially so when our modern-day 'crutches' either fail or are otherwise not available and we have to improvise—or just generally (as one can do things much more quickly and efficiently after having acquired them). Secondly, the need to acquire basic skills at an early age is important for learning more advanced skills acquired later on in life, as these build on earlier learning (even when the new skills are quite different from the older ones). The fact is that learning new skills as an adult is considerably easier if one already has the basics fully conquered. For me, this truism is borne out of experience. Years ago, I came up with the quip: 'Question: can one become a good practical engineer if one cannot sew one's buttons back on?' Answer: probably not!'. It arose after seeing how impractical and inept some qualified engineers were at doing certain normal day-to-day manual tasks that one would have expected them to already know how to do (as well as have an intrinsic feeling for doing it well). For example, I've seen too many who've little or no feeling for tightening up a screw or nut to the right tension without either stripping the thread or having it too loose. As adults, they had not yet developed a feeling for say the strength of everyday materials or how to work them (clearly this puts them at a disadvantage to those who already have (assuming all else being equal that is). The question is why, as for the most part, they were bright people. When I delved into the matter a little deeper I often found that as kids they had done very little exploration of the mechanical world around them, they had not done things such as building Meccano models, or pulling the lawnmower engine apart, or attempt to fix broken clocks, etc. Seeing how and why things break is an essential skill to learn at a very early age, especially so for engineers, as it fine tunes one's understanding about how things work. As well, one also develops a practical feeling for the strength of various materials and other relevant properties that are not easily learned by simple observation or from just reading textbooks. It's my experience that really good techies are almost invariably good at most of these simple skills and that they acquired the essence of them at a very young age. It seems manual dexterity and concomitant mental agility (one's overall perception of what needed to achieve the task successfully) continually improved throughout their lives—skills they learned whilst young transferred later on to a newer understanding of how to tackle work that is much more complex. (In his book 'Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman', physicist Richard Feynman beautifully illustrates how skills learned early on are useful in later life. Feynman was not only a theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner of the first order but also he was extremely adept with mechanical things—skills he'd well honed as a kid (for instance, his exploits at safecracking are well known, so also is his analysis of why Challenger's rocket seals failed). The general loss of craft, trades and various skills in fixing things has had a large negative impact on the population as a whole. It has meant that essentially the workforce has become deskilled in many areas (and consequently so has the whole population). Combine this with the fact that nowadays corporations are making much more use of proprietary (and increasingly secret) technologies and we have the makings of a large social problem. For starters, there is 'new' unemployment amongst once-skilled workers, and given the fact that many workers, especially males, often are much happier when working or creating things with their hands and who now have been deprived from making their living in this way, has meant considerable distress for many of them. Whilst this may seem contradictory (given what I've already said), it, nevertheless, is all the more reason that we must re-evaluate and upgrade the importance of developing life skills at a very early age (as today workers need to be both nimble and flexible and to do so they need to acquire such capabilities very early on in their lives). This brings me full circle, as a kid my mother taught me to sew on buttons and do basic repairs to clothes (which I did even though I didn’t much care for it). She strongly insisted that boys also needed to know these skills (and I suspect it was also to save her some work). If I had not learned those skills when very young then the army would have insisted I do so under its instruction not to mention learning all those other irksome dress-code-related tasks upon which armies insist in drilling into poor unfortunate recruits such as ironing, shining boots, putting creases in pants in exactly the right places, etc., etc. (As part of ones larger kit was little repair kit that contained some cloth patches, needles and spare buttons, and we were drilled in the use thereof.) My mother also taught me the basics of knitting, as I was forever getting holes in my sweaters and she expected me to fix them (which I did pretty well because when completed my fixes blended in and weren't very obvious). The important point here is that it doesn't take much skill just to do a reasonable repair. I never got past knitting squares and scarfs but even that meant that I'd acquired sufficient skills to do a decent repair job. Moreover, it's not essential that one has to like leaning such skills nor that of actually doing them. As a male, knitting certainly wasn’t my scene but I'm now glad that I've learned the basics (as it's actually turned out to be quite a useful skill). What my mother didn't teach me was how to use a sewing machine. Nevertheless, I learned the basics anyway on her machine much to her chagrin. It was not long before I was forbidden to use it, as I used it to stitch together cardboard and other strange materials for various projects and models I was working on. (Incidentally, it didn't stop me using it in secret but she had a sixth sense and she always knew and caught me out after me having used it—it seems I could never reset the tension knob exactly to her 'default' settings!) ;-) Was learning the basics of using a sewing machine a useful skill for a nine/ten year old boy to acquire? In the end it certainly was, as I later learned the hard way, which was by that time the next generation of women had arrived they had become sufficiently emancipated to have essentially given up sewing machines altogether; so whenever I asked women in my life to repair my clothes they simply told me to go take a running jump. 'Do it yourself or get new ones' was the new mantra, so I had no choice but to comply. Whilst I can say that using a sewing machine is a task that I certainly don't relish, it nonetheless remains a fact that nowadays it's dead easy for me to do simple repairs to torn clothes, or to use the button-hole attachment to replace or renew buttonholes, or for me to take up jeans by a few inches.
• saulrh 8y ago
  I spent my time learning how to mend my computer and the pile of arcane technologies that make it up. Out in the real world, as opposed to here on HN, that is the mending that does not exist. It wasn't even forgotten; it's still simply magic. I can call a repair service and have any mechanical object in my apartment functional in hours. I can call my friends and one of them, or one of their parents, will have a suggestion. But if I walk into a random room, filled with fifty random people off the street, one in four of then will be able to repair a car engine or patch a hole in a shirt, but I will be literally the only person in the room that can get someone's phone back on WiFi after the password changes. That's its own kind of mending, and one that's much more difficult, much more useful, and much more valuable, both directly to an information worker like me and to civilization.
  • lm28469 8y ago
    It sure has its own merit, but I think you can remove the last sentence and slow down on the "I'd be the only one in a room of 100 people able to connect a phone to a network". We can boast all day long about how good our tech skills are but out in the real world it's far from "much more useful and valuable to civilization" than a lot of things. It seems like a very narcissistic and simple point of view.
• synthc 8y ago
  I've fixed several appliances by simply replacing a blown fuse. It is an easy fix that costs very little time and money.
• ajuc 8y ago
  I had sewing lessons in primary school in early 90s in Poland. It was compulsory, on "practical technics" lessons. Other subjects covered were: reading 3d schemas, making some wooden toys, basic electric projects (make engine turn both ways with switches), making pancakes, making christmas tree decorations, such stuff. It lasted for 2 years and was pretty fun. The worst thing was learning "technical script" where every letter had to be perfectly written on a milimeter grid. I never understood the point of it, but the rest was pretty useful. I was awful at it, but I learnt how to do it and I (badly) sewed a lot of things through my life. Mostly buttons :)
• ggm 8y ago
  Some manufacturers "get it" timbuk2 fixed my backpack 2+years into the deal. It was a close to zero paper overhead engagement. If I'd known what their intended fix was, I would have done it myself (it was some simple stitching mainly) but the point is they did repair, not replace. and I'm content.
• raincom 8y ago
  Fixing things is very common in the third world countries, because repair charge is cheaper than its replacement. That's why you see lots of businesses there that cater to these: tailors to TV repairmen..
• GuB-42 8y ago
  > No girl graduated high school without knowing how to bake, budget, and sew, while her male counterpart took classes in autoshop and woodworking > This all changed in the 1960s. For good reasons, second-wave feminists fought back against the rigid gender stereotypes of the previous decade and felt that mandatory home economic classes were pushing women into the confinement of housewifery I understand the idea but no, it is not good. Women used to know how to cook and mend clothes while men knew how to fix cars and furniture. It meant that households could do all that. The man/woman distinction was kind of arbitrary but it resulted in useful complementary skills. Gender roles are officially a thing of the past now, but the way we did it is by reducing to the least common denominator. Women don't learn how to sew and men don't learn how to woodwork, and no one knows how to budget. Instead of removing these classes, why provide them to both boys and girls instead, maybe in a modernized form?
  • hilbert42 8y ago
    >"Women don't learn how to sew and men don't learn how to woodwork, and no one knows how to budget." Gender issues not withstanding, you're absolutely correct, the tragedy is that very few people of either gender know to do these skills today and it's resulted in some very negative consequences. As I've pointed out in a rather long post below, we desperately need to regain many of them and there's multiple good reasons why we should do so ASAP.
    • everdrive 8y ago
      There's nothing stopping most people from learning, except interest and impulse control.
      • ghaff 8y ago
        Carry that to the extreme and why bother having school at all? I'm all for a lot of classical curriculum components. But I also think that there is a huge amount of value to exposing high schoolers to hands-on activities that are both practical and potentially rather enjoyable. This includes electronics and so forth by the way. But it might also include sewing.
• FooHentai 8y ago
  About 5 years ago I got very anxious about how specialized I had become. Sure, advancing a career for better pay is great, but it was becoming apparent that a lot would be lost paying other people premium rates to do things I couldn't. So, I've had five years of focus on building my personal capabilities. Or another way to look at it is that I've embarked on the standard middle-class mid-life DIY frenzy. Either way, it struck me recently how much my mindset has shifted: - We want/need a kitchen island - So instead of going out to buy one we found someone that wanted rid of an old table and are in the process of resizing, adding shelving, wheels, and re-finishing. - The vacuum broke, so instead of throwing it away I tore it down and fault-found until it worked again. - The car gets as much maintenance from me as possible before I call the shop. Today, unlike before, I first considering how much self-help is possible before seeking external assistance/inputs. There's far less anxiety about capability and being able to respond to changing situations. The only down-side is the need to maintain some true down-time, as all the DIY stuff eats into that (it's still, ultimately, work and not relaxation).
• shocks 8y ago
  TV repair used to be a real trade. I’ve not seen one in a long time. That tells you a lot.
• swayvil 8y ago
  We don't cook, clean, grow our food, educate our children or walk our fat butts to the store either. Our whole life is optimized for maximum working. Everything else is flensed away.
• busterarm 8y ago
  I had a Maytag washing machine from 1955 that was finally parted with in 2009. It was actually probably entirely functional, but I just could not source a new belt for it after months of trying. Working around the problem finally got tiresome and it was sold to a prop company and replaced with a new machine. The replacement needed multiple service calls for that one year that I owned it.
• MaysonL 8y ago
  Interesting: I just did laundry, including six long-sleeve shirts. Four of them had spare buttons at the bottom: made by L.L.Bean, Nordstrom, Kirkland, and an old Eddie Bauer denim picked up at a thrift shop. The two with no spare buttons were both from Arrow. The problem is, I can't remember the last time I owned eiter needle or thread.
• zoom6628 8y ago
  I grew up in NZ where the attitude is one should at least try to do most everything. Every guy needs to learn how to knit, sew, fix a car, grow veggies, cook a meal, and fix/decorate a house. These are so staple one is almost considered less-manly for not having tried to do all of them. One can fail miserably and turn to professionals but no lose of face for saying so. Decades later I have lived in China 20 years and Hongkong and I still take the attitude of fix before replace. Clothing, shoes, electrical gear, showers....often to the amusement of partner ("you can do that?!") or "that won't work"(and years later is still working). What ALL kids need to be taught in school is basic principles and skills for repairing things. Its fun, builds new skills, maybe gives them a hobby, and creates more rounded people for the future with more environmentally friendly attitude to possessions.
  • learc83 8y ago
    I mentioned to a European friend once that I was planning on building a new coffee table over the weekend. He laughed and commented on how American that was. Maybe it's something to do with countries that were more recently considered frontiers.
• lainga 8y ago
  Well, it's cliched, but since nobody has mentioned it: "But old clothes are beastly," continued the untiring whisper. "We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending, ending is better …" "Government's an affair of sitting, not hitting. You rule with the brains and the buttocks, never with the fists. For example, there was the conscription of consumption." "There, I'm ready," said Lenina, but Fanny remained speechless and averted. "Let's make peace, Fanny darling." "Every man, woman and child compelled to consume so much a year. In the interests of industry. The sole result …" "Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches; the more stitches …"
• gumby 8y ago
  I was interested in the discussion of home economics. My mother would not have taken that class but growing up in SE Asia through war and peace was used to fixing things. When I was a kid, even though she was a full time physician, she also made my sister's and my clothes (in 1960s and 70s Australia). My Dad made our furniture and fixed many things, but sewing? He hadn't the faintest idea. FWIW, neither of them fixes anything any more.
• philpem 8y ago
  I think make-do-and-mend kinda comes with the maker ethos, at least to me. I've repaired the washing machine twice -- once for an open-circuit dryer thermistor (bad batch apparently) and again for bad wiring on the door interlock latch/switch. The sensor cost £5, the interlock cost about half an hour of cleaning the old switch with Q-tips and fifteen of crimping new Faston spade terminals onto the wiring harness. The IDC connectors Indesit use on their wiring harnesses are truly awful things. I've seen similar in an AT&T 3B1 (aka UNIX PC), with the same failure mode: the connector gets warm, the IDC contacts loosen, contact resistance increases, the connector gets warmer and eventually it either burns up or shorts out. Can't say I'm a fan! I've also lost count of the number of things I've fixed with the 3D printer... I'd rather spend a few hours modelling something in OpenSCAD to fix something else than throw the broken-thing away. It's nice practice for when I'm making new things.
• alinspired 8y ago
  mending (even attempting) is a great opportunity to learn how things work. there is no downside trying to dismantle anything that you consider broken,