Yeah. Nobody is innocent here.

Someone linked to The Market for Lemons below. This is exactly right. We now live in the World of Lemons. Everything is lemons, because we can only properly judge quality for the tiny number of things we truly care about. For everything else, we just buy the cheapest thing, because by definition we don’t care enough to do otherwise.

The only possible solution is to buy less stuff, to the point where you have the capacity to care more about each thing, and enough money to pay for these things, which will inevitably cost more.

But then that means making peace with the idea that not having a thing can be better than having a crappy thing. It’s a tough sell to the consumption mindset.