You do raise some important issues in your posts! Where do I start... this is such a fundamental issue. There's an excellent film about "planned obsolescence" and the waste it causes, called The Lightbulb Conspiracy. I'm sure I've mentioned it to you before. It's a must-watch film, which also goes under the title of "Mountains of Waste".
Some people argue that if things were built to last, Western society and our whole way of life would collapse, because firms would go out of business and everyone would lose their jobs. Well, maybe that's what needs to happen in order for us all to recognise the true abundance of the planet and start living properly! It often seems to me that we're just working ridiculously hard to produce ridiculous amounts of stuff just to keep ourselves in ridiculous jobs so we can earn the money to buy ridiculous amounts of stuff that we then throw away, destroying nature in the process!
Why do we need to possess so much anyway? Many of the things we have - like lawnmowers - could just be shared, or rented! I used to share a lawnmower with my next-door neighbour, and we used to take turns to cut each other's lawns!
A couple of days ago, someone told me that it's a myth that ants work hard. Apparently they're really lazy, but they just run about daft all the time. That seems like a good analogy for most people in the "developed world"!