Fixing What’s Broken
I remember coming across the Japanese art of kintsugi, which involves mending broken pottery using lacquer mixed with powdered gold. At first, I didn’t think too much of it: like many aspects of Japanese culture, it seemed like just another novelty. There’s definitely beauty to embracing the brokenness of an object, but to me broken pottery is meant to be discarded to prevent anyone from accidentally cutting themselves on the cracked or chipped area.
For many years, I would use an item until it outlived its usefulness. Wooden pencils would be sharpened until just slightly longer than an inch, clothes worn until their colours faded and holes started appearing, computers used until they lagged to a crawl. There was always the excitement of buying something new, but until then I would use what I currently owned until it no longer served its purpose.
I held onto that mindset until one day I dropped my phone. It was my third smartphone at the time, a Huawei phone that still ran Android. Before that, I owned a hand-me-down Samsung phone with a tiny screen by today’s standards and a Meizu phone that suddenly died on me. I had owned that Huawei phone for a few years at that point, and I took great care not to drop it.
When I told my dad about the incident, he just shrugged and said, “You can always buy a new phone.” He wasn’t wrong. My Huawei phone still worked, but it was starting to slow down for me. The Android version it ran began to show its age and the overall experience of using the phone didn’t feel as smooth as when I first bought it. I was due for an upgrade anyway. And so I bought a new phone.
Objects break down or wear out all the time. More often than not, it is far cheaper to buy a new object than it is to get a broken one repaired. This is because our economies of scale ensure that we can mass produce goods cheaply and effectively. This also means that factories can churn out large amounts of plastic junk, most of which ends up in landfills or somewhere in the natural environment. Today’s planned obsolescence guarantees that most items last for a few years at best. Nothing ever seems built to last.
Like most people, I too have a junk drawer full of obsolete tech. The rapid pace of technological progress ensures that those devices will remain trapped in that drawer until the day I decide to get rid of them. It saddens me that most of these devices, once loved and cherished, were simply cast aside for newer and shinier things.
Do we need more stuff? When I was a teenager, I often struggled to grasp people’s obsession with owning the latest stuff. New watch, new clothes, new phone, new item from current trend. The more expensive the item, the higher your social status. I never understood why people keep up with the Joneses. It all felt hollow and meaningless to me.
Another thing that I never understood was materialism. Perhaps we use materialism as a way to fill a void inside us. It distracts us from our otherwise mundane life, giving us a reason to earn money to buy more stuff. So we buy that brand new item and then… then what? Use it for a while until a newer version comes along for us to buy and replace it? This perpetual cycle, as absurd as it sounds, is capitalism working as intended.
The system is broken, and maybe to some extent, so are we. In our pursuit of happiness, many of us have traded long-term satisfaction for short-term instant gratification. We have given in not only to materialism, but to endless feeds on social media. Are we turning to this mindless consumption to avoid what’s broken inside us? Or to avoid broken relationships?
Sometimes, the world feels like plastic to me. Most things are easily obtainable, nice to look at and, for a short period of time at least, functional. The glossy surface hides the ugly reality that all is not perfect. Once even the smallest imperfections start to appear, once the cracks start to show, we are quick to throw it away for the next plastic thing. Why do we treat everything as disposable?
Instead of endlessly distracting ourselves, perhaps we could pause and look at our broken selves in the mirror. We could examine our faults and how they affect ourselves and those around us. Once we’ve acknowledged how broken we are, maybe we can start the long and painful process to mend ourselves. And just like the once broken pottery in kintsugi, we may seal our fractures and become whole again.