Failure Modes

A lot of thought and talk goes into how good things are, when they’re new, and the review industry is big business. A smaller amount of thought goes into durability, but some people do think about it: there are products with lifetime warranties, the buy it for life movement, and human longevity research. Longevity researchers have discovered that “lifespan” is a misleading metric. Often, people die gradually, not all at once. Sometimes, people can’t even decide whether someone is dead or alive: it’s that ambiguous. So a single number doesn’t really cover the decay curve. “Healthspan”, and disability-adjusted life-years, became the new metrics. (I think we could go further, and coin some kind of meaning-span — the time someone lives before becoming jaded and giving up — in order to codify the Jack Londen-esq I’d rather be ashes than dust sentiment.) But in the case of physical things, we are still stuck with concepts that map more closely to “lifespan” than “healthspan” (let alone…