The same idea, two different eras, and a question that won’t leave you alone: at what point did we stop making things to last a lifetime?
It’s no coincidence. Diego Seara explained it in an article published on Medium in September 2021: before the Industrial Revolution, every object passed through the hands of an artisan who devoted time, patience, and craftsmanship to it.
A piece of furniture was repaired, not replaced. A lamp was passed down, not thrown away. When factories began producing things en masse, we gained speed and lost something harder to measure: the story behind each piece.
You can feel it yourself when looking at these photos. It’s not that the antique object is objectively better built than today’s. It’s that one carries generations of memories, while the other was made to last until the next model. Perhaps we don’t miss the objects themselves — we miss everything they represented.
