EOL industry

Inbuilt obsolescence makes us buy newer & newer things

The other week, my cell phone began to act up, refusing to download an app I needed, and generally being moody and cantankerous.

I took it to a phone shop where an assistant, after a brief examination of the device, diagnosed EOL. What’s EOL? I asked. End Of Life, said the assistant.

How can it have reached EOL, when it’s only six or seven years old? I asked. Six, or seven years, is how long it’s meant to last, said the assistant, implying that after this, it was programmed to commit telephonic hara-kiri.

After a brief funeral service for my EOL phone, I bought its successor, presumably with its own innate EOL.

EOL, or its alias of inbuilt obsolescence, is not restricted to mobile phones but applies to all consumer goods, like refrigerators, motor vehicles, microwaves, TVs, et al.

All such products are designed to have limited lives, as indeed we ourselves are, but the funny, or not so funny, thing about EOL is its increasing divergence between products and people.

While the EOL assigned to people is getting longer with increasing longevity, the EOL of products is becoming shorter and shorter.

Not so long ago, a person aged 60 was deemed to be elderly; 60 is now considered to be a sprightly 50, or even a frisky 40.

Conversely, refrigerators, cars, watches, whatever, which used to have very long lives, often becoming family heirlooms passed on with tender loving care from one generation to the next, are now reaching EOL earlier and earlier.

As the global population ages, and older people stop buying consumer durables, EOL becomes crucial to keep the wheels of commerce and industry turning, and creating jobs for the working-age demographic.

Without EOL coming to the rescue and generating perennial new demand that requires continually enhanced supply, the world economy, as a whole, would itself reach EOL, perish the thought.

There is one snag, however. With increasing production eating up scarcer and scarcer natural resources, a unique and irreplaceable product might soon face EOL: a product called Planet Earth.

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