So far, my take on aging is succinct — Everything hurts, and there’s no cure. But there is now an inanimate object corollary — Nothing works, and it’s nobody’s fault. This isn’t just me kvetching. Recently a TV ad popped up with the same theme.

It was hawking replacement windows of all things. I should use their company because the other guys were always blaming the previous window company or the installer or the maintenance guys, but this company did all of the above. As a vertical monopoly, it couldn’t give you the runaround. The buck started and stopped with them.

Of course, as the ad admits, we have been conditioned by unreliable products and merchants to believe no one, so they are probably wasting their ad money, We aren’t going to believe them either.

My latest collision wth unreliability was the premature death of a whole-house humidifier, installed a few years ago at ruinous expense. When it worked it made winter more endurable, particularly for allergy sufferers. But then it didn’t work.

The $90 repairman, from the company that sold it, installed it, and allegedly maintained it, said that when the city water in my town ran through the device it produced scale that interfered with its operation. Furthermore, the model in question was inferior and known to croak about the time the warranty ran out.

He did not explain why these problems with the water and the device weren’t mentioned when they sold it to me. He did offered to install a far better device that would solve all my problems for twice the cost of he first lemon.

So who’s to blame? The HVAC company, the manufacturer of a crummy product, the city that supplied the crusty water, or the idiot customer who fell for the faux panacea in the first place. I get that the buyer should beware, but if he’s not a humidifier or water quality savant, how’s he to know?

This is only one of a thousand such daily instances of products or services that blow up in one’s face, all of them miraculously blameless for their own failure to deliver as promised. Part of it is due to the proliferation of stuff. the more you own, the more there is that can go wrong in your life. Thoreau was righter than he knew —simplify, simplify.

in the proto-suburbs of my youth, the houses were modest compared to today’s McMansions, and their contents were on a similar scale. Now they are filled with too many labor saving and entertainment devices to count. Things have dictated the need for houses with more space to accommodate them — shelf space, storage space, closet space, counter space. There our stuff can live until it dies.

And die they do. Part of it is engineered by the silicon geniuses who control our lives. A few years ago a microwave died. The usual repair chap charged me the usual hefty fee to deliver the usual bad news. A single microscopic mote on an integrated circuit on a wicked stepmother board had failed. He offered to order and install a new part. The price? About double what a new microwave would cost.

Thus, the landfills and junkyards are stacked high with piles of metal and plastic all suddenly worthless because of an infinitesimal poof in the land of silicon. This is the new normal. God knows, the wonders that surround us are wonderful, but only while they last.

Once upon a time, when the black and white TV ceased to glow, there was an affordable solution. My Dad unscrewed the back panel, looked to see which tube wasn’t alight, unplugged it, took it down to the parts store, and bought a replacement. Voila! Howdy Doody was back in business. Now, a silicon hiccup dooms the entire device, and you are in for a trip to the big box, en route to the poorhouse.

Nor is this scenario confined to the silicon valley of the shadow of death. I have been warned by appliance, water heater, and air conditioner people that the new and improved models that are so much more environmentally friendly come at a price. The trade-off is energy efficiency, but a shorter lifespan, perhaps half as long as in my parent’s day.

We lived in a house built in the 1920s that had a hatch that was no longer used in the basement where the coal for the furnace was once delivered. The previous owner had converted to oil heat, though it was dirty, smelly and expensive. I was probably about ten when we switched to a natural gas furnace. When my parents downsized, probably 35 years later, the same furnace was still cooking wth gas. It wouldn’t happen today. They’d be on their second or third furnace by now.

What is to blame for this expensive record of constant failure and updating? Do we chalk it up to progress or planned obsolescence, a world grown too technically complex for the lay customer to understand their stuff or the accompanying exploitation of consumer ignorance by rapacious corporate greed? Is it environmentalism or regulation, a spendthrift desire to be up-to-date or a careless squandering of our prosperity, or is it obliviousness on the part of the engineering class to the hardscrabble lives so many customers endure? All of the above?

I certainly don’t want to go back to the Little House on the Prairie era, but my parents who grew up in the Great Depression would have regarded the idea of buying a new phone when the old one still worked as bizarre, as they would paying a whopping monthly fee for TV when you could get most of what you wanted to watch for free. And if an appliance or car or other device failed in under ten years they’d never buy another of that brand or from that store.

A baseball mitt was expected to last for an entire childhood, the train set in the basement was bought used, and Halloween costumes were run up by Gram on the trusty Singer. How far from all that is the latest cyber fad designed in California or Japan, manufactured by sweatshop labor in China, and doomed to live for only a brief season.

The material life of my youth may be regarded as dating from the age of the dinosaurs, but our stuff had a good long run. The toys that keep today’s adults in perennial debt have the lifespan of mayflies.