/Nothing Is Meant to Last

"The acceleration of contemporary life also plays a role in this lack of being. The society of laboring and achievement is not a free society. It generates new constraints." - Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society

Acceleration and the Logic of Disposability

The contemporary condition is one of perpetual acceleration. Our, experiences, decisions, and desires are increasingly structured by systems that compress time, minimize friction, and deliver outcomes with unprecedented immediacy. In our modernized environment, the value of an object or interaction is often determined more by its speed than its inherent quality: how quickly it arrives, how seamlessly it performs, but most importantly, how rapidly it can be replaced.

This acceleration is not simply technological, it is idealogical. It reflects a deeper transformation in how value is understood. Convenience has become the norm; on the otherhand, any sign of slowness is looked down upon. Where earlier generations expected to wait, to repair, to invest, today's cultural logic rewards the opposite: immediacy, disposability, and turnover. Products, relationships, and even ideas are subject to the collective consciousness that treats permanence as inefficient and delay as intolerable.

We now live in a world controlled and manipulated by our instant gratification. Do you want food right now? Grubhub. Do you want a taxi right now? Uber. Do you want to love right now? Hinge. Do you want social information on someone right now? Facebook. Do you want that new toy? Amazon. Don't have the money to afford it right now? Afterpay it. Anything and everything is available in minutes, if not seconds. This radical compression of time has reoriented expectations across all domains of life. Waiting becomes not just inconvenient but irrational. Endurance, effort, and patience, once hallmarks of maturity, are now experienced as inefficiencies.

Under such conditions, the logic of disposability becomes naturalized and ingrained in our culture. A device begins to lag, replace it. A platform loses relevance, abandon it. A relationship becomes strained, move on. Rather than being anomalies, these behaviors are rendered "rational" by the systems in which they occur. They are not personal failures but adaptations to an economic and cultural structure that prioritizes novelty over endurance.

Material Culture and the Loss of Durability

The erosion of permanence began not in abstract thought, but in material culture. In the early twentieth century, manufacturers began to design products with a predetermined lifespan, a strategy known as planned obsolescence. In 1925, the Phoebus cartel was created as an alliance of light bulb manufacturers. Their goal was to replace long-lasting bulbs with an artificially limited lifespan. This practice, initially devised to prompt repeat consumption, has since become a central principle of industrial design. Products are no longer built to endure. They are engineered to fail, to fall behind, or become completely incompatible with newer systems.

This degradation is not merely phyiscal but symbolic. It signals a major shift in the relationship between individuals and the objects they rely on. Where durability once implied craftsmanship, modern consumer goods are expected to be provisional. Phones lose software support within a few years, appliances degrade through brittle components and non-replaceable parts, even clothing is produced with synthetic materils that fray, fade, and unravel under a year. Functionality is subordinate to turnover. Repair becomes more expensive than replacement, not by necessity, but by design.

These conditions have restructured expectations around use and value. The individual is no longer a steward of objects, but a user in a constant state of upgrade. Ownership has been redefined not by possession, but by temporary access. In many cases, it has become increasing common where the consumer does not even own the software they use on their device, but licenses it under restrictive terms that ensure dependency. The material world thus mirrors the digital one: flexible, responsive, and fundamentally detached.

The psychological effects of this material impermanence are serious. When the tools of daily life are unstable, the notion of stability itself begins to erode. What was once considered exceptional, durability, longevity, reliability, becomes obsolete. The expectation of failure, and of swift replacement, becomes internalized. In such an environment, to invest deeply, in an object, a person, or an idea, feels increasingly irrational.

This normalization of transience extends beyond the object world. It conditions a worldview in which permanence is not just impractical but undesirable. Flexibility, convenience, and speed displace patience, care, and repair. And as this logic becomes embedded in the most mundane aspects of life, it subtly prepares individuals to approach everything, even relationships, beliefs, and selves, as disposable.

Connection as Commodity

The logic of disposability that governs material life is not just confined to objects. It has migrated, imperceptibly at first, into the realm of human relationships. Nowhere is this more visible than in the structures of contemporary romance, where dating platforms present intimacy as a selection problem to be solved through filtering, matching, and optimization.

Since their inception, these platforms have completely reshaped the meaning of human connection. Their interfaces encourage rapid evalutation over gradual understanding, and breadth of choice over depth of investment. Each profile is a potential alternative, one among thousands, produced and consumed within an ecosystem designed for speed and frictionless abandonment. In this lens, the possibility of commitment is reframed as a limitation, a foreclosure of better outcomes yet to be discovered.

This environment cultivates a psychological disposition often described as maximization, the tendency to seek the optimal choice from an ever-expanding pool of options. Iyengar and Lepper (2000)¹ have shown that this pursuit, rather than producing satisfaction, often leads to anxiety, indecision, and regret. Transposed into the contemporary dating world, the result is a form of chronic dissatifaction: an inability to remain present with what is, due to the imagined promise of what might be.

Yet the consequences of this system extend beyond the screen. When relationships are framed in the same terms as consumer goods, searchable, comparable, and replaceable, the self is transformed as well. Individuals perform for the algorithm, polishing their personas not for connection, but for appeal. In time, vulnerability is displaced by performance; emotional depth is reorganized around metrics of attention and reach. The emotional life is restructured by the same logic that governs marketing.

That being said, beneath this performance, something essential resists. Human connection cannot be manufactured on demand. It cannot be accelerated, outsourced, or optimized. Real intimacy requires time, attention, and the willingness to endure uncertainty. It emerges not from perfect compatibilitry, but from shared imperfection, conflict, growth, and the slow accumulation of trust. The qualities are increasingly incompatible with the systems that now mediate romantic life.

This dissonance reveals the deeper irony of algorithmic connection: the very technologies that promise to make relationships more accessible often render them less attainable. What appears as abundance becomes, in practice, a form of scarcity, the scarcity of presence, of attention, of depth. As with material goods, the availability of endless alternatives undermines the very conditions under which lasting value can emerge.

In this way, the instability of modern relationships is not an aberration of culture, nor a sign of moral decline. It is a logical outcome. When the material world is designed around impermanence and disposability, the emotional world begins to mirror its contours.

The Vanishing Self

The dispoability ethos that governs products and relationships extends with particular force into the domain of digital privacy. Once considered a foundational principle of online engagement, privacy has been gradually transformed from a followed rule into a luxury, a niche concern, or a naïve fantasy. In its place stands a new framework of participation, one in which the surrender of personal data is not merely incentivized, but required.

This transformation did not occur overnight. In the early decades of the internet, users were actively encouraged to actively conceal their identities. "Never share your real name online" was not juist cautionary advice, it reflected a broader cultural belief that privacy was both protective and respected. But as the internet evolved from a supplemental space to a primary infrastructure for life, these values were systematically dismantled.

Today, the platforms that mediate most digital experiences, Google, Facebook, and Amazon are built on surveillance capitalism. Their profitability depends not on the sale of products, but on the extraction of behavioral data. What users click, hesitate over, purchase, and desire. The logic of these systems is simple: to participate is to be actively tracked. Refusing to share one's data is not a neutral decision, it is a form of exclusion. To opt out of this surveillance is to be removed from visiblity, convenience, and digital life as we know it.

What is often misunderstood is that this condition is not the result of widespread apathy or ignorance. It is the product of deliberate design. The digital environment has been structured in such a way that meaningful privacy is nearly impossible to acheive without sacrificing participation in social, economic, and civic life. The burden of protection has been offloaded onto the individual, even as the means of resistance have been made inaccessible or ineffective at scale.

In this context, suggestions that individuals should "just hide behind a VPN" or "avoid sharing personal information" are not logically sound. These gestures, while not without merit, operate within a system fundamentally hostile to the idea of privacy. The infrastructure does not fail to preserve privacy whatsoever, it is not meant to.

What has thus emerged is a condition of quiet resignation. Most individuals are aware that they are being tracked; even though many express discomfort, few believe anything can practically be done. The erosion of privacy becomes another tolerated condition, another feature of a world in which nothing is built to last, not even the boundaries of the self.

Endurance Without Illusion

To live within a system designed for disposability is to inhabit a reality in which impermanence is not merely common, but expected. The products we use, the platforms we engage, and the relationships we form are increasingly shaped by architectures that reward circulation over stability, performance over presence, and optimization over care. As this logic expands, it alters not only how we interact with the world, but how we come to understand ourselves within it.

This essay has argued that the erosion of durability, across material, social, and psychological domains, is not an incidental outcome of technological development, but a feature of contemporary digital and economic systems. The normalization of impermanence has cultivated a form of cultural resignation: a tendency to adapt to ephemerality rather than resist it, to accommodate surveillance rather than question its necessity, and to approach relationships with the logic of convenience rather than commitment.

There is no clear alternative offered here, no toolkit or prescription that can meaningfully reverse the systems described. But recognition itself has value. To name what has been lost is not simply to mourn its absence, but to clarify the terms under which meaning must now be constructed. In a landscape where continuity is rare and permanence is unrewarded, intentional forms of attention, memory, and care may become the only means by which coherence can be sustained.

Such practices do not offer escape. Rather, they suggest a mode of endurance, of living within compromised systems while remaining alert to their costs. If resistance is no longer possible in the traditional sense, then reflection becomes its quiet successor: not a refusal to participate, but a refusal to forget what participation entails.

"It is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us." - Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism