The traditional economic equilibrium is based on the interaction between supply and demand, where the market adjusts prices and quantities to reach a point of stability. However, over the last two decades, planned obsolescence has altered this scheme. This marketing-driven strategy deliberately shortens the useful life of products to encourage their constant replacement, generating an accelerated consumption cycle. While theoretically maintaining active demand, it criticises its sustainability by prioritising commercial interests over real needs. This model, although questionable from an ethical or environmental perspective, reflects how modern practices redefine the classical bases of the economy, straining the ideal of equilibrium with artificial consumption dynamics.

Here in Canada, bike kits are sold that can be assembled according to individual needs. There are also bike rental companies that rent bicycles for short or long periods of time. In Venezuela, things are different: 90% of the car fleet is over 30 years old, and today there is a proliferation of cheap, poor quality Chinese bikes, so much so that there have been many accidents as a result of misuse, abuse, and the quality of the bikes.

My brother, who lives in Caracas, Venezuela, has a 1979 Jeep Toyota, which, as they say in the Venezuelan colloquialism, ‘he has poisoned it’, that is, it is basically a ‘Frankenstein’, refurbished with different brands, what we would call a mutant ‘hybrid’; the only thing that remains original is the bodywork. (My brother is a mechanic).