Comment by uep
This is how it was for me growing up blue collar in the northeastern USA in the 80s. My father fixed everything in the house and the vehicles. I inherited my older siblings clothes, and my younger siblings inherited mine. My mother would hem pant legs shorter when we were young, and then let them back out as we grew older. If you wore a knee or an elbow out of clothes, it was getting patched.
This instilled some good and bad tendencies in me. I do almost all of the repairs around the house myself. I work too much though, so I don't always have enough time or energy. Even though I can easily afford it, I have a hard time paying someone else to do them. This means I live with broken stuff longer than I should.
I'd probably have more money if I spent that time working on side projects instead of doing maintenance and repairs.
> This is how it was for me growing up blue collar in the northeastern USA in the 80s. My father fixed everything in the house and the vehicles. I inherited my older siblings clothes, and my younger siblings inherited mine. My mother would hem pant legs shorter when we were young, and then let them back out as we grew older. If you wore a knee or an elbow out of clothes, it was getting patched.
Thing is, they were able to in the first place.
Forget about fixing a modern car. The electronics side is a mixture of "a datacenter on wheels", DRM and anti-tamper technology (sometimes enforced or heavily suggested by law such as in emissions control, sometimes by reality, e.g. "Kia Boys") and high-speed protocols instead of early age wires and relays that you could troubleshoot with a decent multimeter. The physical side is a ton of plastics designed to absorb crash energy and finely tuned metal alloy stuff (with the form also having crash safety implication) that your average DIY person cannot reasonably weld instead of plain old steel sheets. You can't buy a "reasonably repairable" new car any more because of the legal mandates and because you don't want it to be stolen by some kid having watched a YouTube or Tiktok video showing how to bypass the locks.
And clothing... patching a 1980s piece was possible, the fabrics had weight and structural integrity of their own. Nowadays it's extremely thin fabric everywhere that shreds itself after a few washing machine cycles. Try to patch it and you'll more likely than not find out that your very act of pushing a needle through it to apply the patch just causes the next rip to appear. You are still able to purchase better quality clothing technically but you end up paying like 4x the amount and it's still made in some Bangladeshi or Chinese sweatshop under horrible safety and employee rights standards.