Built on Hope

Staring into the Void; trying to find the Light

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Husband. Father of 3. English Teacher. Avid video game player. Honest writer. Lover all things nerdy.

  • Diminishing Returns: How Corporations Make Worse Products that Cost You More

    I was in my 20s when I first encountered the popular sitcom, How I Met Your Mother. As a twenty-something desperate to graft the identity of a show into my being, me and my friends watched avidly, insistent upon the parallels between the friend group in the show and our own in reality. Many of the idioms and witticisms that peppered each episode made its way into our own vernacular: Big Fudge, Classic Schmosby, Legen-wait for it-dary, among a myriad of others too long to list. The show itself has aged somewhat gracefully (although there’s a lot of sexism and womanizing that is better left to the late 2000s), but there was always a line that stuck with me that I never got around to fully embracing or agreeing with.

    New Is Always Better.

    Now context, of course. The phrase is spoken by Barney, the show’s clear cut example of the type of person you DON’T want to be and should not emulate or imitate in any way whatsoever. But it should be stated quite clearly that even though he was meant to be this reprehensible foil to the chivalrous and romantic Ted, Barney often was the more lovable of the two, and thus was given more memorable lines for audiences to latch onto. Being played by the very charismatic Neil Patrick Harris only further leaned into this notion that, while on the surface, we should not say or do as Barney does, the mixed signal being sent was that Barney was awesome, much more fun, and so we should receive his messaging much more easily. I digress.

    The point I’m driving at here is that something felt off about this phrase to me. Certainly corporate America and advertisers want us to believe this, but are new things actually better than old things? Or are we so easily swayed by recency bias and FOMO that what we are told we should want is a worse decision for us?

    Let’s explore the history of what is known as Planned Obsolescence.

    Planned Obsolescence

    Thomas Edison first patented the incandescent light bulb in 1879. It was an engineering breakthrough that was a vast commercialized success that propelled society forward in a way difficult to describe. No longer would humanity be limited to activities during waking daylight hours. Our lives would no longer have to revolve around the sun. It paved the way for massive improvements in civilization as electricity given to the masses revolutionized the way that we all lived our lives.

    The light bulb quickly improved over the next 50 years or so. By 1924, it had a burn time of 2500 hours or more. What a remarkably convenient invention for the working class!

    However, things had improved too quickly for companies to innovate and keep up. The longer that light bulbs lasted, the lower the demand for them was. This created a financial problem for all of the companies manufacturing these products, and one that they colluded to snuff out.

    In 1924, a group of the leading industry leaders in the market met in Geneva and decided to intentionally decrease the life span of the light bulb. This still took a remarkable feat of engineering as you had to not just make a worse product that didn’t work, but pinpoint the exact moment that a light bulb should burn out to keep your company reputable. That’s a lot of work to preserve profits!

    This group’s collusion only lasted until the 1930s or so, but the principle of what they achieved was already enshrined:

    It is acceptable to make a worse product as long as the majority of consumers aren’t the wiser, and it allows the company to still make money off of it.

    This is the essence of Planned Obsolescence, what is also sometimes more vulgarly referred to as enshittification.

    I think we all, for the most part, suspected that this has always been the case. Whether it’s Apple making older models of iPhones run more slowly through iOS updates, newer appliances seeming to break far more often, or car parts lasting just long enough to keep you coming to the shop, and hopefully bother you so much that you’ll decide to update with a newer version. The phrase “they don’t make them like they used to” is an evergreen phrase because with each passing generation, we get further and further from making things that are built to last.

    This is the domino effect that we live with today as a result of that meeting in Geneva. Instead of a market designed to improve our lives in ways that are convenient and cost-effective, it instead seeks to undermine itself so that it can continue to treat itself to our hard earned money. It’s the exact reason why tech companies don’t put all of their best features into one device right away. They need something to sell for the next model!

    Oh you don’t think they could’ve sold you a phone with a better camera and battery life ten years ago? Or maybe they were just stretching out the features so that you would feel like you shouldn’t settle for older products.

    This has happened in a big way with the Internet and Social Media too. Google searches used to be reliable in that the top result was oftentimes the most relevant to what you were looking for. That was gradually made worse to favor results of ad partners and sponsored websites. And that has since been made even more terrible with the advent of Google’s Gemini AI that summarizes (correctly or incorrectly) the gist of what you are searching for, and lowering the analytical requirement of our amateur researchers.

    Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (I will never call it X), TikTok all have shifted their algorithms’ priorities from “the most recent thing that someone you follow has posted” to “Hey, here are things that seem to align with your interests and browsing patterns that we scraped from your phone’s data. Won’t you please spend more time and money through us?” The result is an advertisement filled hellscape that no longer resembles what I signed up for, nor does it connect me to the people that I want to be connected with. It is all vastly worse than it used to be and there is a noticeable toll that it has taken on individuals and on society at large. There is more connectivity than ever before, and yet personal connections are at an all time low. That isn’t natural, and therefore it must be manufactured.

    But if these decisions and changes are overall empirically worse for us, then why do this in the first place?

    Privatization

    As oft happens with my posts (unintentionally I might add), we generally end up at the same place we usually do when we try to figure out the culprit of why things seem to be intentionally getting worse in society. It’s like in Scooby Doo whenever Fred and the gang would unmask the monster at the end of each episode. It didn’t matter how many twists and turns and misdirects the show took; you always knew that there was some old greedy white guy responsible for all the trouble. And perhaps, rather unsurprisingly, that too is the resolution in our case as well.

    Greed is the discordant melody and unnatural rhythm that we must contort ourselves to because this dysfunctional reality has it installed as a default feature. Long gone are the days where products were made for consumers like you and me. In this stock market driven economy, there is one be-all and end-all king of capitalism. No, it’s not the CEO; it’s something far more nebulous and, dare I say, useless: the shareholders and private equity.

    This single pivot in perceived value has caused literally every single service, product, necessity, luxury, and anything else you can buy and sell to suffer from a severely steep drop in efficiency, quality, and functionality.

    The housing market? Bought up by private equity firms to flip and sell at a massive gain, keeping first time homebuyers out of the market and inflating the values of homes.

    The entertainment industry? More and more, films and shows end up being sequels or remakes based on existing IPs because it is less of a financial risk to make something that people are already familiar with. It is a rarity these days to find an original show or movie that finds a cultural foothold, or even gets the green light to get made in the first place, and you can blame the fickle feelings of shareholders because of that.

    Want to order a sports jersey from one of your favorite teams? A shame there’s really only one company, Fanatics, that has cornered the market, meaning they can charge exorbitant prices for absolutely shameful quality. I bought a soccer (or football depending on what country you’re reading from) jersey for Team USA during the World Cup, and within one wash the numbers and letters were already peeling off. When I attempted to contact customer support to voice my displeasure and receive some sort of compensation for the terrible quality despite spending over $100 on this item, I was told that because I washed it already they couldn’t take it back, but they could offer me a 25% refund since it was defective. I took the money, but I was angry at this anti-consumer practice and that whoever was on the other end of the script I was being read didn’t have my best interests in mind.

    There are so many more examples just like this, and thankfully someone has taken the time to create a website tracking products and how they have gotten/are getting worse over time. It’s worth a follow if you care about where you spend your money.

    Let’s take it a step further. Our current presidential administration has taken massive leaps to make sure that this type of business practice is enabled, getting rid of consumer protection regulations in the name of corporate profit. In addition to that, the extreme defunding of critical programs, namely the Department of Education and Medicare, has rendered them defunct and ineffective, putting tens of millions of our fellow citizens at risk.

    But that’s kind of the point right? The greedy want us to feel broken and desperate. They want us uneducated. They want us to feel like we have no other choice. They want us to rely on someone to tell them what to do without thinking about if it’s right or fair to the rest of us. This is the reality we live in now. We are devoid of critical thought and instead default to the parroting of talking heads and pundits when we should be more accountable, to ourselves and to our leaders.

    We cannot be dependent on someone to come and do the job for us. Why do you think there’s been such a big push for AI in practically every platform? If you become dependent on it for answers, then you no longer question its integrity or its motive. Vigilance is hard. Accountability is hard. For some of us, reading is hard! The deck is stacked, but we should not settle for less. We deserve so much more than what we are being given right now, and the road that we are on is unsustainable.

    There is a serious problem in the world when companies prioritize profit over everything. We are often the ones who suffer the most in the name of making the magic money number go up. But there is only so much they can take before they sully the market they’re trying to wring dry. Life is impossibly expensive, and how we respond matters. Research your local districts about who’s running for office this November. Prioritize people who are looking to make life more affordable and rein in the corporations who pull Congress’ strings from behind the scenes.

    Like the innovation of the light bulb, let’s illuminate these seedy spaces so that we can live our lives on our terms, not the way a group of rich men in a secret meeting say we have to.

    Thanks so much for reading everyone. Sorry it’s been so long since my last post. Life, as it often does, gets in the way. My kids were home for the summer and so I spent a lot of time entertaining them, and then my wife unfortunately got into a car accident that lost us our family car for a month and a half. Everyone is thankfully okay, but there have been other priorities besides researching and writing this blog. And now that the school year has started for me as a teacher, I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to have a consistent schedule with posting. Nevertheless, I’ll be pressing on, and if you can remain patient with me, there’s still plenty more to come.

    You can follow this blog on Facebook and Tumblr as well as on WordPress/Jetpack. Reading, sharing, commenting makes a huge difference and means the world to me.

    Until next time.

    HOPE IS THE REBELLION

  • BONUS POST – America 250: Ranking Each 50 Year Period in our History

    I wanted to do something a little different for this and (hopefully) make a shorter, more digestible post. Because comprehension is on the decline and satire feels less and less like an absurd reality and more like our current one, I wanted to preface this by saying this is meant to be halfway tongue in cheek. It’s an impossible task to do an actual ranking without making some wildly insensitive assumptions, so let’s keep it light, have some fun, and dive into some half-baked analysis of our country. I’m sure no one will have strong opinions about this whatsoever.

    (more…)

  • Why Trillionaires Shouldn’t Exist

    Guys, I have a confession to make.

    I have never, at any point, now or in the past, had a lot of money.

    I’ve worked multiple jobs, I’ve received government assistance at one point, and I’ve had help from family over the years.

    But never have I ever considered myself to be anywhere higher than middle class at best.

    Now, that’s not to say that I don’t make good money in my profession. New York City school teachers get a pretty decent salary. And every year I’m making more money than I’ve ever made in my entire life. I make more money than my parents do! Starting next year, I’ll officially be making six figures!

    I know! That should be a bigger deal than it is!

    But this is not to brag. This is all to say that despite all of these things being true, I actually am poorer now than when I was making a dollar above the minimum wage working at my local mall over a decade ago (a minimum wage that has not changed on the federal level since 2009!).

    I think about how despite making more money than I’ve ever made, I actually can’t afford to own a house. I’m lucky enough to have healthcare through my job, but I wouldn’t be able to afford that otherwise. I have two cars, which might be a pretty good wealth indicator if it wasn’t out of necessity for the size of my family. And I still have some debt that is definitely shrinking, but will still take too long to pay off.

    Now I want to be clear here: I AM NOT COMPLAINING.

    I have been uniquely blessed in countless ways and my situation is still way more favorable than many other people in this country. However, just because I’m not at the bottom of the totem pole doesn’t mean I can’t speak up about a system that is clearly rigged and broken.

    I might even be uniquely disqualified from discussing this in the first place because I very clearly have a bias in that I would benefit directly from the status quo being shaken up.

    But I think, for me at least, there is a truth here that resonates, and should resonate, for all of us. And by us, I mean the 99% of us that don’t hold a majority of the wealth in the world.

    Friends, trillionaires should not exist.

    (more…)

  • Hope in the Garden: How the Knicks’ Starters Represent a Template for a Positive Mentality

    I’ve been a Knicks fan for as long as I can remember. Like most of my sports lineage, I trace back my fandom to the man who left me with far more baggage than wisdom and life lessons, my dad. I would only ever see him on the weekends growing up, but I do remember, in between running around outside and playing video games with my friends, just waltzing into the living room and sitting next to my dad on the couch and watching whatever game he had on.

    We live in New York, and so my dad rooted for the Jets, the Rangers, the Yankees, and of course, the Knicks. I never knew the extent of his fandom for the Knicks (he was always more of a Yankees fan at heart), but when I was old enough to care about basketball they weren’t exactly putting their best foot forward on the court, and my dad was not exactly quiet about how bad they were.

    I would watch Stephon Marbury (my dad joked about his self-made signature shoe, the Starbury, even though it was an affordable option for kids who couldn’t afford Jordans), Channing Frye, Eddy Curry, Quentin Richardson, small but electric Nate Robinson, sure handed David Lee, and the list goes on. The only game that I ever went to at MSG, I watched this team get the tar beat out of them by Ben Wallace and the Detroit Pistons. It didn’t matter to me that the team was terrible. I just cared that I was spending time with my dad and feeling like connecting with the game was helping me connect with him.

    He died in January of 2025, and so he never got to witness the team in its current form. Which is why I’ve been thinking a lot about how he would’ve loved to see this squad succeed. How he would’ve marveled at the maestro, Jalen Brunson. He absolutely would’ve complained about the exaggerated zestiness of Karl-Anthony Towns. And I know he would’ve hated Josh Hart’s pace and motor, mostly because he’s the player that would’ve reminded him the most of himself: stubborn but strong and tenacious.

    What I would give to have one more moment on the couch with him, watching the historic game 4 comeback in real time and experience basketball euphoria in a way I’ve never felt before next to him instead of alone trying not to wake up my loving wife and kids. He’ll never know what it felt like to cheer for one of the most dominant playoff teams of all time, but this championship felt like vindication for a lot of us.

    Wherever you are, Dad, you can stop cursing at the TV. They finally did it.

    And so it’s in honor of this historic event and the memory of my dad that I wanted to analyze the players who made this possible, not from a basketball perspective, but from a personal one. What special quality did each of these players bring to the table in terms of their identities that not only led to the most important win in New York sports history, but that we can learn from and internalize for ourselves?

    Follow along as we focus in on each one.

    (more…)

  • I Am Artificial Intelligence, and So Can You!

    I’m sitting down here trying to write this post and it feels impossible.

    Not because I have writer’s block.

    Not because the subject matter is difficult to talk about.

    Not because what I’m about to say is any way remotely controversial.

    But the idea that someone is taking their spare time to sit down at a computer to type out their thoughts, unassisted and devoid of any influence from outside technological agencies…it just feels like the dying embers of a lost art. And it’s incredibly depressing to think about how something as fundamental as WRITING could even be in this realm of thought in the first place; that it could be one day soon be rendered an obsolete practice.

    Friends, artificial intelligence is ruining everything that we love, and if we let it, could do so in such a way that it could be irreversible or have ripple effects that last for generations.

    (more…)

  • A New Hope

    I’ve been in the blogging game for a long time. Never really found much success in it, but when I was posting consistently I was getting a decent amount of eyes on what I considered very valuable to me: my poems, short stories, and general random quips and thoughts that came to me as a young college student.

    As I’ve grown and matured I’ve sporadically added to that original blog, but it feels more like a time capsule now; a relic from a time that doesn’t fully represent who I am anymore, nor what I want to talk about.

    And so here I am with what I consider to be a fresh start; a new, more singularly focused blog beyond just the musings of youth. A commentary on the greater world around us, digesting it through the eyes of an informed everyman, and processing it in a way that not only adds to the din of the rage inducing stream of the algorithm, but allows us to see a path and a way forward through the darkness.

    I’m not prideful enough to think that I would be a beacon, but someone who humbly lights torches along the way.

    The name of the blog also was carefully considered. In one very real aspect, Star Wars is a large part of my personality and upbringing, and so to be able to take one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite shows and utilize it for this purpose was a tremendous honor (shoutout to Tony Gilroy). Beyond that, though, is the beating heart of these writings.

    I think that it has become incredibly easy to be crushed by the oppressive weight of bad just seeping into every discernible part of our lives, and in that light it’s easy to only focus on that. But you don’t rebuild on an unstable foundation. Uncertainty does not power a movement.

    But HOPE can.

    Hope allows us to dream beyond what is possible.

    Hope gives us the strength to carry on in the face of defeat.

    Hope is the spark that leads to the fire of change.

    And so here at Built on Hope, the goal is to inspire and motivate, but also to knock down lies, manipulations, and bullies and bad actors.

    Because Hope is not quiet or timid or ashamed. It is bold and risky and requires courage in the face of evil, ignorance, and greed.

    I can’t promise that I’ll always get it right. But I can promise that I will always give it my best effort, fully authentic and fully informed as often as I can.

    As I write this, it’s important to know that I’m also as big of a sports guy as I am a nerd. And my favorite basketball team, the New York Knicks, are in the midst of one of the greatest playoff runs of all time as they’ve reached the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999.

    The reason why I mention this is because the mantra that has carried them this far is one that I think represents the purpose here well:

    “Job’s not done”

    There is no time to rest on our laurels and kick back while the world around us is scrambling around to sell off our society and humanity piece by piece. The job isn’t done. It likely never will be, but we must trudge and continue onward.

    I don’t know how often you can expect to see my posts, but I’ve got a lot of time on my hands lately with paternity leave and summer vacation looming ahead of me. I hope you’ll follow me along on this new journey.

    In the meantime, stay tuned, hold fast, and remember above all else —

    — HOPE IS THE REBELLION