I took a year off from college once and traveled around the country. For a while, I stayed out on the farm where my grandmother had been born, living with my great-aunt.
I was helping my grandfather paint houses. I came home one day to find that my great-aunt had darned a couple pairs of my socks.
Really: she took needle and thread and created these deft cross-hatchings that patched holes. I remember I was touched.
Hers was a different world, of thrift as a virtue, a penny saved being a penny earned. I mention this because I just looked at one of my computer keyboards. You can see the keys I type most because there are little clean spots where my fingers tap, circles in the grunge. The keys I don’t hit as often have thin veneers of a brown oil-based dirt the composition of which I don’t want to speculate on too much.
So I consider turning the computer off and getting some cleaning solvent to scrub that old keyboard clean, but I know that PC is on its last legs, anyway. Or last circuits.
It’s like so many gadgets that stop working: microwaves and radios and phones and other clever gadgets with hundreds or thousands of intricate parts, where one single part breaks but it isn’t worthwhile to fix, so the whole contraption gets thrown out.
I miss my great-aunt. I respect how she lived. Those socks are long gone now, perhaps torn into rags before they were used up and discarded. This might sound goofy, but I kinda miss them, too. Just the darned parts.
OmbudsBen 
I miss that world, too. I dislike the world of planned obsolescence. I dislike how poorly things are made, being told by the appliance repair guy that all fridges are crap now, they rarely last past 10 years. I miss buying something and knowing, or at least truly believing, that it will work and last. Having socks that are at lesat worth darning. My daughter, born to this world, thinks I’m cheap and old fashioned. When she has to spend her vacation money on a new stove or fridge, she’ll come around.