My father is an old school car mechanic in eastern europe who (at least while i was young) hoarded all kinds of things and reused/repurposed them. I inherited his mentality. At some point he partnered up with a guy and they started their own business. His partner is more of a capitalist. He would run the computer diagnostics on the car, replace whatever the computer says is broken without much root cause analysis, then the old parts are thrown out. This gets repeated until the car runs. They make money on each part. The insurance company pays and everyone is happy. My dad's quality of life is better. He has a weekend house now. He sometimes complains how in the old days one would really fix things instead of replacing them, but he is getting older and not in a position change how the world works.
My own story is playing out a very similar way and I am constantly struggling to decide what is the right thing to do and what kind of person I want to be. Most people of my age (especially in the US) don't even think about these things though.
It's not always easy to find the right balance. I've worked in the same place for obout 15 years. Earlier on, encountering limits of old legacy systems, I frequently spent lots of time finding creative work arounds in coding and automating. But over the years these have become less tenable, since I'm only one person, and home grown solutions without dedicated resources are a bigger risk to operations than purchasing a mediocre off the shelf product.
My father is an old school car mechanic in eastern europe who (at least while i was young) hoarded all kinds of things and reused/repurposed them. I inherited his mentality. At some point he partnered up with a guy and they started their own business. His partner is more of a capitalist. He would run the computer diagnostics on the car, replace whatever the computer says is broken without much root cause analysis, then the old parts are thrown out. This gets repeated until the car runs. They make money on each part. The insurance company pays and everyone is happy. My dad's quality of life is better. He has a weekend house now. He sometimes complains how in the old days one would really fix things instead of replacing them, but he is getting older and not in a position change how the world works.
My own story is playing out a very similar way and I am constantly struggling to decide what is the right thing to do and what kind of person I want to be. Most people of my age (especially in the US) don't even think about these things though.
Edit: formatting.