Buy well, buy once

My grandfather still has his Hickey Freeman suits and sports coats tailored and repaired by a local menswear shop. Their Dualit toaster still works while I have personally gone through many Cuisinart toasters. Their technics AV components still work with their high quality speakers. Their Sony Trinitron TVs still work. Their pots and pans from their wedding are still in active use. Their Pyrex continues to store leftovers decades on. I am currently using the Minolta film camera and lens that my grandfather bought in the 80s for traveling around the world with.

When I go to their home, I am always in awe of the high quality objects that still function perfectly fine and can all be passed down. When I look at many of the things my parents own and most of the things I own, I see less and less of that. Our clothes are cheaper. Our pans less resilient. Our technology is less repairable.

Buying well certainly leads to a longer lifespan for objects. However, I find that’s becoming tougher and tougher to find these days.

I spent the better part of 15 years living out of a small backpack, travelling ~9 months a year then flying home to work short software contracts and save up for the next trip. As a consequence, I got used to not having very many things. One pair of pants, one pair of shorts, that sort of thing. I think my policy was something like "If I haven't used this thing in the last 3 days, I don't really need it along".

At one point, I revisited my storage locker, filled to the roof with everything I had owned in my 20s, and couldn't really find anything that I wanted to take out of it. "This isn't the shirt I wear", and "I already have enough socks" (meaning four socks: 2 on my feet and another pair for when I wash these.) I ended up just letting the storage company auction it all off.

It was really weird buying a house and starting to fill it with things. I bought a couch and a TV. I got my old guitar back from the friend I'd lent it to 20 years earlier, then eventually bought a second one and a bass to go with it. It's actually kinda nice to have a few possessions.

The attitude is still there though. At one point I had to buy five iPhones in a single day as test machines for a job, and it was all I could do to physically force myself to click the buy button. It was like fighting every natural impulse in my body to overcome my aversion to consumerism.

I guess it has left me in a healthy spot in regard to "stuff ownership."

But I've seen actual minimalists and they're nothing like an urbanite living in an all-white studio apartment.

They're tightly-knit circles of friends livig in small towns who go way back and therefore can trust each other with their property and, of course, save money in the process because none of them does it just for minimalism's sake.

Bottom line is if you want both minimalism and individualism, you're gonna spend a lot of money on services rendered by strangers.

You see the resilient things at your grandparents' house because those are the only things that have survived. All the poor quality things they purchased over the years are gone by now. Also, you and your parents probably favor lower-cost items (as do most people these days) over longevity. This may simply not have been possible in your grandparents' time, pre-globalization. It's still very possible to get high-quality and long-lasting goods (the buyitforlife subreddit is a good starting point), but you're going to pay a lot more for them than most people are willing to in comparison to the "replace it when it breaks" mass-produced-in-China goods.