I received the news as one receives a death sentence. My coffee maker — that discreet and efficient capsule lady, who had served me for ten years with the loyalty of an English butler — was condemned. Not by time, not by wear, not by the final click of its gears. But by the cold decision of an invisible tribunal: the factory. The service center, in a bureaucratic tone, informed me that this model had been discontinued. No parts, no repairs, no future. The machine still pulsed, still bubbled water, still released the warm aroma of the morning. Yet, for the market, it was already dead.
It was as if they were saying my mother, lucid and strong, no longer deserved a doctor because she had passed the “regulation age.” And to complete the cruelty, they offered me fifty bucks — fifty! — for them to personally, as pious gravediggers, handle the disposal.
The revelation of absurdity
The machine — I repeat — works. One must hammer this truth like defending an innocent in a court of exception. It works! It spins, heats, spits coffee. What does it lack? Nothing. What does it have? Life left. What condemns it? The invisible verdict of industry.
It wasn’t a malfunction that killed it, but the calendar. Every three years or so, it demanded a cleaning, a recalibration. Nothing different from us: medical check-ups, dentist appointments, confessions on the therapist’s couch. But this time, there was no salvation. The verdict was sharp: “We no longer service this model.” And that was it.
And as if technical assassination wasn’t enough, came the final insult: fifty bucks for disposal, as if offering alms for a corpse. Imagine the scene: me, in mourning, handing over my living coffee maker to a smiling employee, promising it a dignified fate in electronic waste. The industry, which killed it, still proposes to handle the funeral. And at a discount.
The liturgy of disposal
Byung-Chul Han has already warned us: we live in an age of excess and disposal. Objects don’t need to break to be thrown away; they just need to age, lose their shine, fail to promise novelty. Planned obsolescence is the religion of our time: a meticulously choreographed ritual where the gods are instruction manuals, and the altars, gleaming store displays.
Zygmunt Bauman spoke of “life for consumption.” Relationships, jobs, affections — everything converted into a commodity with an invisible expiration date. Liquid love, liquid objects, promises that evaporate. The coffee maker wasn’t discarded because it failed, but because it no longer fits the logic of hyperconsumption.
Gilles Lipovetsky would add: it’s the “paradoxical happiness.” The market seduces us with the promise of the always-new, the latest, the fastest — and for that, it must decree the premature death of what still breathes. Satisfaction doesn’t come from owning, but from replacing. Every purchase is a funeral disguised as a party.
The disposal of people
At its core, the coffee maker is only a caricature of what we already do with people. We are all silently discontinued. The friend who no longer entertains is archived. The love that no longer excites is deleted with the coldness of a “drag to trash.” The body that no longer matches the aesthetic ideal is banished from the altar of social media.
If Nelson Rodrigues were writing today, he wouldn’t only speak of marital betrayals. He would say we live in the era of programmed infidelity. No promise lasts beyond the system update. Everything must be replaced — from cellphones to moral convictions, from relationships to coffee makers.
And yet, we carry on with this farce naturally. We feign surprise when we are discarded, as if we weren’t discarding others every day. Obsolescence isn’t only planned by industry; it has infiltrated the soul. We are our own manufacturers, our own gravediggers.
The coffee maker’s funeral
I imagine, without shame, a funeral for my coffee maker. It lies on the table with its metallic body still warm, exhaling its last scent of coffee. Around it, emotional friends and relatives — the toaster, the blender, the microwave — all already aware that death, for them too, is only a matter of time.
And there stands the industry, smiling, bringing plastic flower wreaths and promotional leaflets for the new model. Gentle gravediggers dressed as salespeople. They cry with one eye and wink with the other: “Sorry for your loss, but check out this can’t-miss deal: the new coffee maker, now with Bluetooth, froths milk in five seconds, and, of course, will soon be discontinued.”
The grotesque merges with the sublime. It isn’t just a machine dying, but a certain idea of permanence, of loyalty. Every purchase carries the funeral within it. Every bonus gift is a tombstone.
The last capsule
And so I ask myself: if even the coffee maker is declared obsolete before it stops working, what does that say about us? At what point will someone tell us we no longer have technical support, that our parts have been discontinued, that investing in repairs is no longer worth it? Will we also be collected for fifty bucks and sent to ecological disposal?
Perhaps, deep down, we are already living that fate. Who hasn’t felt the strange sensation of being “updatable,” of needing to reinvent oneself not by desire, but by decree? This is not aging: this is being assassinated by the calendar.
And there lies the tragedy: in contemporary life, nothing dies a natural death. Everything — people, ideas, machines, affections — is pushed into the grave by the same invisible hand that, piously, offers the next model.
This is programmed obsolescence: the certainty that, in the theater of consumption, there is no eternity. Only a queue of funerals with appointed times, each disguised as a launch.
References
- Bauman, Z. (2007). Consuming life. Polity Press.
- Han, B.-C. (2015). The burnout society. Stanford University Press.
- Lipovetsky, G. (2007). The paradoxical happiness: An essay on the society of hyperconsumption. Gallimard.
- Rodrigues, N. (1993). A vida como ela é. Nova Fronteira.
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