“When Did We Stop Fixing Things?”

I once lived in the stables on the private estate of a Belgian countess. I know, I know, it sounds like another one of my stories. But it's true. The countess had reduced the number of horses to a couple and no longer needed the stables.

Those stables dated back to when Napoleon was emperor of France, which meant they were older than the United States. She could have torn them down. Instead, someone looked at those old stables and asked what else they could become. The answer was apartments. One of them became my home.

When did we stop doing that with everything else?

There used to be television repair shops, shoe repair shops, vacuum repair shops. Something broke and the first question was, Can it be fixed? Now the instinct is often, What should I replace it with?

I may give my age away, but I remember when televisions had tubes. A friend of our family owned a TV repair shop, and the place was filled with boxes of different tubes. If your television stopped working, you didn't head out to buy another one. You took it to someone like him, who figured out which part had failed and replaced it.

Now, a large screen TV that was large three years ago is simply replaced, not because it stopped working, but because we "needed" something bigger. I have an iPhone, and I get the feeling Apple would like me to replace it every year. They don't need the money as much as I do, but they are persuasive.

I'm not suggesting everything old deserves to be saved. Sometimes the new refrigerator uses less electricity. Sometimes repairing the old television costs more than replacing it. And sometimes something is simply worn out.

But somewhere along the way, I think our first question changed. It used to be, Can I fix this? Now it's often, What should I buy next?

I have a brother in California who's definitely a DIY kind of guy. If something stops working on his vacuum cleaner, I picture him taking it apart and cleaning it before he even starts to think it should be replaced. Meanwhile, I'm scrolling through Amazon looking at newer models.

So which are you? When something stops working, do you reach for the screwdriver or start shopping?

And maybe the bigger question is this: When did we stop asking if something could be fixed?

Mj