Longevity

The effects of longevity tend to be very often underestimated and overlooked. But this is a fundamental mechanism influencing economies, extraction of natural resources and quality of life in general.

For humans longevity, known also as life expectancy, has had a profound effect with progress of medicine in the last 100-200 years. The number of people on Earth has been growing not because there are so many new births, but because we live so much longer. The life expectancy doubled or even tripled. During the early industrial era, an average life expectancy in Liverpool, England was about 25 years. Now it has more than tripled. It is not uncommon we have 4 generations alive - grand-grand parents, grand parents, parents and children.

Simply speaking the same birth rate results in 3x the number of living people.

The same applies to manufacturing and consumption. Businesses want to manufacture more. So the logic is simple - reduce the longevity of products. Then to have the same amount of products "alive", we need to manufacture more. Much more. Which is very bad. For environment of course, but also for us - humans - in the everyday life. So often we get frustrated things break and cannot be repaired. Or - in the Internet economy - things stop working simply because they are no longer "supported".

My mother has been using an iPhone 6 for many years. The battery died (they do) and we had it replaced. Other than that this has been a perfect smartphone for her, capable of doing everything - calls, navigation, banking, social media, photos. She has also been using the official mObywatel app which is provided by the Government of Poland and provides many useful features such as electronic identity, electronic driving license, electronic COVID vaccination records and many more. Recently she asked for help as the app stopped accepting the password.

When going through the password reset procedure, the app told me it had to be uninstalled and reinstalled. When trying to install, it said it needed iOS 13, while the phone only had 12. And could not be upgraded. Apple offered the older version of the app, but that version could not log into the upgraded government cloud service. Which effectively meant the perfectly working phone is now dysfunctional, should be trashed and traded for a new one. This is how the government is caring about natural resources and climate by forcing citizens to trash goods which are in a good shape.

But of course this is just an example of what is happening on a much broader scale. Things becoming obsolete for no particular reason and us in general having no issue considering anything 2-3 years old as really old and obsolete. This is a death spiral we have created. There is still time to break from this spiral, but this must be started with education and wise policies to mandate long term support, promote servicing and repairs and discouraging consumers from buying new stuff "just because they can". The real problem everybody fears is this would slow or even shrink the economic growth. The growth, which when fueled only by the consumption death spiral, will lead us to hitting the ground anyway.