There was a time when people knew how to mend things.
Not because they had attended a weekend workshop entitled Rediscovering Sustainable Living in Twelve Easy Steps, complete with artisan coffee and an accompanying workbook. They repaired things because replacing them was expensive, wasteful and, perhaps most importantly, unnecessary. A chair with a loose leg wasn’t discarded. It was turned upside down, examined for a moment, and quietly made useful again.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped calling that common sense and started referring to it as a lifestyle choice.
That seems to happen rather a lot these days. Ordinary habits that survived for generations without attracting the slightest attention suddenly return wearing better branding, a fashionable logo and a subscription model. Baking bread becomes mindful wellness. Growing vegetables becomes regenerative living. Walking instead of driving becomes a movement. The old ways haven’t changed at all. Only the marketing department has.
I sometimes wonder whether we’ve mistaken novelty for improvement.
Progress, after all, is a wonderful thing when it genuinely earns the name. Modern medicine has transformed lives. Engineering has achieved things our great-grandparents would have considered miraculous. The ability to speak with friends on the other side of the world in seconds remains astonishing when you stop long enough to think about it.
None of that is the problem.
The difficulty begins when every new idea arrives carrying the quiet assumption that whatever came before must therefore have been inferior.
That is a remarkably expensive assumption.
It persuades us to replace before repairing, to upgrade before understanding and to discard before asking the rather awkward question of whether the original item had actually stopped working.
You can see the consequences almost everywhere.
Furniture built to survive a century now competes with furniture designed to survive the warranty. Clothing once repaired with a needle and thread is replaced because a button came loose. Telephones receive software updates until they become inexplicably sluggish, gently encouraging us towards the latest model, which differs from the previous one in ways detectable only by marketing departments and people who spend far too much time reading specification sheets.
Everything is moving forward.
Whether it is moving forward usefully is another matter entirely.
One of the advantages of growing older is that you eventually become a witness to fashion rather than merely its customer. You begin noticing that ideas have an extraordinary habit of disappearing for thirty years before triumphantly returning under a different name.
My grandparents would have recognised composting. They simply called it compost.
They understood seasonal eating because there wasn’t much alternative.
They knew that borrowing from neighbours built stronger communities than buying everything individually.
They cooked meals from ingredients rather than instructions.
They repaired tools because tools were expected to last.
None of this was revolutionary.
It was simply life.
Modern society often treats these habits as though they were quaint relics rescued from a forgotten civilisation. In reality, they remained quietly functional all along. They merely stopped being fashionable.
There is a curious confidence that accompanies replacement. Nobody ever announces that the new system is probably a bit worse but considerably more profitable. We hear softer language instead. Modernised. Streamlined. Enhanced. Optimised. Future-proofed.
Translated into plain English, this frequently means someone has discovered a way to charge more for something that now does rather less.
It is difficult not to admire the consistency of it.
Take almost any everyday activity and you’ll find an older version quietly waiting in the wings, unfashionable perhaps, but strangely dependable.
Maps still work without batteries.
Books remain readable after software companies go bankrupt.
A notebook never asks you to reset your password.
A fountain pen does not require acceptance of updated terms and conditions before writing a shopping list.
A decent kettle continues boiling water without collecting anonymous usage data.
These observations are not arguments against technology.
I am rather fond of technology when it behaves itself.
They are arguments against forgetting.
There is a considerable difference.
Every generation inherits knowledge from the one before it. Some of that knowledge deserves retiring. We no longer need to travel everywhere by horse, nor should we be particularly nostalgic about diseases that modern medicine has thankfully relegated to the history books.
Other knowledge, however, disappears for no better reason than neglect.
Patience.
Maintenance.
Self-reliance.
Attention.
The ability to distinguish between something being genuinely broken and merely requiring a little effort.
These are not old-fashioned virtues.
They are timeless ones.
The phrase “interesting times” has become something of a modern cliché, usually accompanied by raised eyebrows and an expression suggesting that civilisation has once again misplaced its car keys.
Perhaps every age believes itself uniquely complicated.
Perhaps every generation imagines it stands at the edge of unprecedented uncertainty.
What fascinates me is not that our times are interesting.
It is that so many of the tools for navigating them have been quietly placed in storage while we busied ourselves searching for newer, shinier replacements.
The remarkable thing is that they haven’t disappeared.
They are still there.
On workshop shelves.
In kitchen drawers.
In handwritten recipe books stained with decades of honest cooking.
In conversations with older neighbours who solved practical problems long before they became online tutorials.
In habits that ask for patience instead of speed.
None of them promise to save civilisation.
Most of them won’t even save you very much time.
What they may do, however, is something considerably more valuable.
They remind us that resilience was never a product you could buy.
It was always a way of thinking.
Perhaps that is the first lesson in living through interesting times.
Not that the old ways were perfect.
Simply that we were rather too quick to stop asking why they lasted so long in the first place.
Until Next Time
Dominus Owen Markham
Modern society is great at turning 1 +1 into quantum physics. So grateful I grew up before unnecessary technology invaded our world.
Wise