From the newsletter
Your fridge is running
July, 2026
When the fridge starts its death rattle, it's the sound of big chunks of cash desperate to escape your savings account. It's hard not to feel aggrieved. "They don't make them like they used to", we say, remembering the behemoth televisions and floor-crushing washing machines that our childhood homes were presumably built around.
And it's true...sort of. A study of Norwegian households did find a significant decrease in the lifetimes of washing machines and ovens that occurred around the 1990s and early 2000s, but also found that fridges, freezers and dishwashers all retained similar lifespans. Other research, like this from the European Environment Agency and AHAM survey data (as reported by Wirecutter) shows more modest declines, and in some cases modest increases in lifespan.
What's indisputably true is that appliances are vastly cheaper (adjusted for inflation) and more energy efficient than they were in the past. Government regulation plays a role, as do global trade and fashion, but one major reason appliances aren't kept around as long is that the cost of repair is so high compared to the cost of a replacement appliance.
Some of that cost is expensive electronics, but most of it is purely labour costs. Appliance repair workers are not being greedy. It's the Baumol effect in action. Scale and technological improvements make the appliances much cheaper to build, and at the same time the cost of a technician's labour rises. A person can only visit so many homes in a day; their effort cannot be scaled up like a factory or an AI model can.
That's why we don't always end up with better versions of what we had before. The replacement only has to be good enough and cheap enough to make the prior, more expensive version less appealing.
That will apply to jobs in all sorts of industries beyond appliances as AI-created versions of service work crowd out human-created ones. We're already seeing that in the low-end of content creation, but also in legal work and customer support.
It's unsettling at best, and devastating at worst, but there is good news to be gleaned from the appliance store. If you want to buy a washing machine or a fridge that lasts 25 years, you still can. Those options remain available, if you know what to look for. The Wirecutter article points out that long-lasting appliances cover both ends of the cost spectrum.
On the low-cost end there are appliances built with fewer features, fewer complex components, and simpler, easier to repair parts. On the high end are appliances built to a higher standard with more expensive parts and a more repairable design (not that price or brand is necessarily an indicator of quality or longevity). And then there’s whichever model of fridge that Harrison Ford was saved by.
Are there similarly two paths for us in our rage against the machines? Chances are that you cannot exist on the cheapest end of your field, which automation will like eat up. It's where the details matter and where a person is required to be accountable for the work, that there's still plenty of scope for skilled humans.
Your challenge, right now, is to know what it is that you truly do, which is probably not exactly what your job description says. Only when you know what you offer, can you measure its value against the alternative options in the market.
This article first appeared in the July 8th, 2026 edition of the More Human newsletter.