I recognize your sentiment, but also would like to comment on the state of this subreddit in general.

TL;DR: at the top because this is way too long:

There’s very little incentive in BIFL. Businesses only have to design products to outlast their competitors, and most people couldn’t afford their current standard of living if all their products were BIFL. lastly, people frequently change their minds and habits, so most products will not be needed for a lifetime. BIFL relies on good product design, which can be broken down into the following three elements:

1. Materials have become cheaper to manufacture. I’m going to refer to history and effects of this one as MAT

2. Products have become more technologically complex. this one is TECH

3. The market (aka individual people) don’t actually need or want BIFL products. (Even most of us here) - this leads to companies not offering them. Issues around this one are referred to as USER

If you really want to get into the true BIFL space, buy equipment that is simple and analog / mechanical, and made of natural materials. Metal, glass, wool, cotton, and to some extent wood. (Mostly just avoid petroleum based products like plastics) You will lose out on some tech such as stitching patterns in your sewing machine example, but you will gain insane reliability. 1950s - 1960s singer sewing machines are perfect for this, or cars designed to be worked on in the field, like ww2 era jeeps / the ford Pygmy - everything can be fixed with like two tools. (MAT, TECH) These vehicles were also designed and built when plastics were prohibitory expensive, so less refined / more natural materials had to be used instead, (modern combat vehicles are an atrocious mess in this regard) An important note is that the tires on these early jeeps didn’t last nearly as long a modern tire because synthetic or synthetic hybrid wear items are universally better than their totally organic unrefined aka natural counterparts.

The isn’t without trade offs, as wear items like tires, shoes, motor oil, climbing ropes or anything that deals with gravity and requires flexibility or temperature resistance have a key advantage over natural materials at the cost of lifespan. These products are constrained by physics to be inherently not truly BIFL as the core their function is to be used up. Evolutionarily speaking, it is a waste to be any better than the base minimum to survive. Why should a tree be able to withstand 1,000 mph winds when the most that exists in nature is maybe 100? The consequence here is that lumber isn’t any stronger than nature needed it to be. MAT

This same evolution exists in modern capitalism, why should one product last 15 times as long as the competition for 350 times the price? Luxury items used to be luxury because they worked well, as opposed to their cheaper alternatives. (insert Reddit’s favorite economic theory about Sam Vime’s boots here) Today though, even the cheapest crap shoes are pretty good when compared to the cheap crap shoes of 100 years ago, as material science has improved by leaps and bounds. TECH

Due to the general improvement of synthetic materials, like plastic and rubber, many luxury items have pivoted, instead of focusing on function to focus on novelty, uniqueness, look, etc as the functionality requirements of any given product can be met by a much lower bar. When synthetic goods first started competing in functionality to luxury goods, (here meaning products composed of more natural materials) the functionality of luxury goods was equivalent to, if not worse than their cheaper alternatives. As the requirement of function could be met by essentially any product, the differentiator of luxury became the form, which explains the state of modern high fashion. MAT

So why are older (non wear) items BIFL?

1. Petroleum based product were expensive and also didn’t really exist, so my 113 year old ratchet wrench didn’t have the option to use a plastic gear. MAT

2. Technology was less advanced, and simple, so less domain knowledge was necessary to fix any specific item on the rare chance it broke, like a all metal hand crank candy press or a wood fired stove. As for the gear in my ratchet, the lifespan would have been a lot shorter, because lubricants at the time were not great. However, due to the fact this socket wrench cost my great grandfather about $375 dollars in todays money, when it inevitably wore out, he could take off the back and put a new gear it. The main reason he didn’t have to, is that he didn’t actually use it very much, and my father and I were judicious in applying modern synthetic lubricant that reduces friction 4-5 times better than the 1907 lubricant the socket was designed for. This point about lubricants is interesting because again, petroleum based lubricants are perhaps the biggest technological innovation that has allowed modern society to flourish besides computers. Also it is the only case in which petroleum based products lead to a longer product life for the products they are used on. Another element is that my ratchet has like 65 teeth or something, a modern BIFL ratchet will have more, 95- 135 or so, I’m not a ratchet expert. This means there is more precise machining, and less physical work is necessary to use the tool but honestly for my use cases (changing oil, occasional small engine repair) it’s not noticeably better or worse than it’s modern counterpart. There’s definitely something to be said about the precision with which my ratchet was made vs one with a Computer Aided Design, but it’s pretty much negligible in this case. TECH

3. Lastly though, and I would argue the most important is the survivability bias. There were lots of cheap products one hundred of years ago, but they’ve all literally disintegrated. For example, the Canadian armed forces in WW1 were issued boots with cardboard construction, which last time I checked doesn’t hold up well in a muddy trench. As mentioned before, my socket wrench didn’t actually get used that much, so it really hasn’t seen much wear, and it wasn’t lost or misplaced because my family has lived on the same farm since the 1820s. MAT & USER