Convenience is a Curse

Plastic didn’t simply replace steel, wood, and leather; it replaced values.

When something is designed to be cheap, light, and disposable, it subconsciously, trains us to treat everything—objects, time, even people—with the same careless shrug.

A polymer pistol works fine until it doesn’t. When it finally cracks or wears out, you scavenge the sights or the slide and throw the rest away like a dead butane lighter.

But a man will blink away tears as he stands, silent, in front of a gun safe, staring at the empty slot where his grandfather’s Smith & Wesson Model 25 used to live before a house fire took it after seventy-five years and three generations of hands.

Steel and walnut demand something in return. Leave them unloved and they rust. Carry them honestly and they earn scars, take on patina, wear smooth exactly where your grip lived for decades. They age the way a life well-lived is supposed to age: slowly, visibly, with stories etched into every nick and scratch. Plastic stays forever newborn—shiny, anonymous, untouched by time or memory.

I’ve cleaned a 1911 by lantern light, inhaling, with reverence, Hoppe’s No. 9, while friends argued over whether the rattle in the old war horse was “character” or just slop. They weren’t talking about tolerences. They were describing themselves and how sometimes age and wear become reliability.

The guy who babies a $4,000 Nighthawk and the one who still trusts his grandfather’s 1944 GI Colt both know the same secret: the things you carry end up carrying you. Treat them like trash long enough and you’ll start believing you’re disposable too.

It is not really about the objects. A leather-bound book has a presence that no tablet can match. A walnut stock still holds—maybe only in imagination, —the smell of the tree it once was.

Real materials remember. Plastic only remembers the mold.

We didn’t just swap materials; we swapped values.

Convenience won. Quality lost. And somewhere in the trade we forgot that pride of ownership isn’t elitism—it’s respect.

Respect for the man who blued the steel and formed the part with a file, for the tree that became the stock, for the hours you’ll spend keeping it running, and, finally, for yourself.

The 1911 keeps going not because it’s the lightest or highest-capacity but because every time you sweep the thumb safety and hear that crisp, authoritative snick, every time you rack that heavy slide and feel it lock home like a vault door, you’re holding proof that some things were built to outlast the man who carries them.

And if you let it, that simple truth can still make you want to become the kind of person whose memory is to become a legacy.