This was by design, not an accident; a thread https://twitter.com/Khaleel38702408/status/1259849127158059010

First, they manufactured things badly to ensure you had to buy them often. Designed obsolecense made sure the great circle of a rapid expanding economy always had coal, fuel to turn the gears.

Soon after, they invented a sort of emotional gap year: The "teenager" was born.

What makes this special, or different? Well, simple. Teenagers, as such and defined in the post war years, had few if any responsibilities, and could secure or expect access to at least some percentage of the family income thru afterschool work or allowance.

This created a huge consumer class for useless goods, bobbles, pop music records, clothing lines, comic books - toys.

Now, the problem is, it's societially expected that one eventually stops this behavior. This is, implicitly, childish short term thinking based behavior.

How do we solve this problem? Normalize Peter Pan People. 35 year old unmarried men with FunkoPop collections and women in arrested development, shaving their head and mad at their father's at 35 are the inevitable end result of this decline-for-fun-and-profit

But what do I know