Stuff breaks down. Stuff wears out. And fixing stuff costs money. What’s unfortunate is when people invest in complex things, only for those things to break, leaving the owner to deal with the hassle and expense of repair.
Entropy is all around us. Your car will stop running. Your TV will break. You will die. It may not be now. It may not be in 10 years. But rest assured, physics is always at work. And our systems will return to the dust they came from.
The more complex you make your life, the greater the potential for system failure. New appliances are often scorned for “not being made the way they used to be made”. It’s not that the way things used to be made was necessarily superior – everything is manufactured to a price point – but the complexity of our appliances has certainly increased, leading to more potential points of failure. And for some reason, people usually want this complexity. They want to connect their refrigerators to their wifi. They want their TVs to be “smart”. I can’t say I understand it, but these markets exist for a reason.
Maintaining complexity is expensive, if not in money, then in time. You can save yourself an awful lot of time and money by decreasing the complexity in your life.
Recently, I bought a fancy adjustable desk, one with mechanisms in the legs that allow it to be raised and lowered. My key motivation was to upgrade my desk ergonomics since I work from home, and have occasionally experienced great pain in my wrists. My old desk worked great, but when you spend 40 hours every week sitting at it, I guess it’s not so great. I could have saved money buying a hand-crank adjustable desk, but I figured it made more sense to go big or go home and just buy a desk that can be adjusted at the touch of a button. It’s pretty cool, and I’m really enjoying this new setup, but one thing that makes me leery is just how much additional complexity exists in this desk compared to my previous desk. By purchasing this desk from a brand known for its top quality, I’m hopefully avoiding premature failure. But make absolutely no mistake: these mechanisms will fail. It’s not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’.
Now, I get paid a lot of money to be a software developer. And I intend to spend most of my years in this occupation not commuting to an office. So I think this desk is worth it (at least, that’s my excuse rationale). But what about other areas of life?
Vehicles are highly prone to entropy. Anybody who owns a vehicle knows this: that’s precisely why they are so expensive to maintain. They are highly complex mechanisms, composed of multiple, interconnected systems. Your car will wear out. Not if. When.
Houses are highly prone to entropy. Shingles get battered. Foundations endure stress. Seals corrode. Beams wear out. People talk about house values going up endlessly, but they never talk about the cost of maintaining those houses. I don’t know many people who have bought houses from the 1800s. Why? You know why. Not if. When.
Computers are highly prone to entropy. Motherboards lose some of their connections. Materials degrade. Hard drive actuators wear out. SSD channels stop working (okay, I’m not a hardware guy, I don’t know the official terms). Almost more importantly, standards change, and connectors become outdated. Yes, social entropy is a thing, too. Not if. When.
Now, if you’re willing to assume the risks of all of these systems, that’s perfectly fine. But let’s be clear about these risks: they exist. And fixing failure costs. When your standard computer lasts 5-10 years, hey, you can get a lot of value out that. That might be totally worth the cost. But if you want every electronic gadget under the sun, and one single replacement would put you in the red, well, there may be a better solution out there.
What I find is that these things sneak up on people. As I’ve mentioned, this already happens with cars because we get used to them and forget that wear and tear is their destiny. I read reviews from people decrying the quality of a brand because their 10 year old car needs new outer tie rods. Well…yeah. Those are wear items. If your outer tie rods last over 10 years, holy crap, you’ve had some good tie rods. People act scandalized that the “quality is so bad”, but really that’s just what happens when you use a car: it wears out. We call something a “wear item” because it’s essential function stipulates that it must wear out at some point. While only rust or an accident is likely to murder your subframe, tie rods constantly hold your wheels in place, and they are absolutely critical to turning, with every turn causing microscopic wear. What did you expect?
I used to have a big George Foreman grill. I would make up a batch of 12 burgers in one night, and eat those for lunch at work over the course of several weeks. Finally one day, the bottom plate stopped heating. The solder that held one of the wires to the bottom heating element had broken. It’s possible a simple soldering iron could have fixed that, but the material looked a lot beefier than normal solder, and I don’t know crap about electricity (yet!). Either way, it had always been a greasy mess to clean, and bulky and difficult to store, so I ditched it. This happened right before I moved where I am now, and shortly after moving here I bought a large non-stick square pan with grooves on the bottom for cooking meats on a stove. Some of the material at the very edges has started to wear off, but it’s otherwise basically a pan. It’s already lasted me far longer than the grill did. And sure, it has it’s downsides, too (tiny flecks of grease getting all over the stove being the most prominent), but failure is probably not going to happen anytime soon: It’s a pretty simple system.
My dad’s car started having transmission issues a few years back. While getting it replaced with a junk yard transmission (small gamble), he went and found a newer used car and bought that. While both my parents work jobs that require them to be on-site, and an extra vehicle has come in handy for when one of their vehicles needs repair work, they are now paying for 3 vehicles. They get a good deal on labor for these repairs, but still, they are now paying to maintain 3 vehicles, instead of just saving up for a replacement. I don’t really like this, but I do understand. Plus it’s their money, of course.
The complex system is not necessarily inferior, it is simply prone to systemic failure. It’s important to be aware of this.
So, if you wanted to decrease the systemic complexity in your life, how might you do it? Here are a few ideas:
- Avoid excessive vehicles and engines.
- Avoid fragile gadgets, or avoid gadgets entirely.
- Prefer analog, or have analog backups.
- Decrease your dependence on complex systems. Some systems can certainly be enjoyable, but if they are essential to your life, take heed. You may want to learn about these systems to decrease your risk.
- Avoid excessively large houses. It may look glamorous, but it’s going to cost you a small fortune to clean and maintain.
Or just…have a ton of money and time for everything. I guess there’s always that. But you can outspend even the highest of paychecks, and there is a very cold limit to the amount of time you can expect in this life.
(Here are some other random thoughts that occurred to me while writing this:
- It’s easy to afford a good pair of $120 shoes if you aren’t paying $500 per month on a car. Even shoes wear out, but imagine the cost savings!
- Syncing devices is a pain in the butt. Prefer something that is easy to setup.
- Keeping a full backup of something is often a carry-over of poverty-thinking. It is sometimes the inferior option to simply paying more for higher-quality. But at other times it can be a viable strategy. What makes this bad is when you find yourself keeping backups of everything out of fear. To me, this is a sign you’ve built too much complexity into your life, as everything has become essential.
- My parents would be less likely to need an extra car if their jobs allowed one person to drop the other off using one car. They used to have this arrangement for when one car was in the shop, but their time schedules changed. Working jobs that are in close proximity is one potential way of managing such a scenario. It isn’t possible for them now, but don’t let the possibility of a thing detract you from considering the merit of a potential solution. Sometimes the process of thinking about something can lead you to better solutions, I think this is why so many dismiss the FIRE movement as impossible, despite the plethora of people saving tons of money and retiring extremely young. I find the lack of creativity disturbing.
- Much of what I’ve written in this post plays off my belief that most stuff is a liability, but that is a discussion for another day.
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