Products Are Bad, But These Products Are Good

Color Print of a Copperplate Picture of a Toy Shop, 1860. Utagawa (Gountei) Sadahide. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

2020 was ripe with horrible lessons, a real year of realizing things, but one of my most annoying and rather late realizations was finally understanding that products suck.

Stuff is bad. The stuff on the shelf, bad. The stuff on my Pinterest board, awful. The shit in my Target cart, abominations. Why do I need to buy a whole new food processor when only the top is broken? Why is all my…