From broken-in to broken

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone when I say that I like things that are broken in.  I don't care much about objects as status symbols or the perception of wealth or hipness.

But I do like high quality, functional things.  Two things that I love and use for hours every day are my shoes and my headphones.

My Converse tornado zip shoes are my absolute favorite shoes ever.  They are super comfortable, fit me like a glove, and I've worn them every day for probably a year and a half.  These shoes see about 2 miles a day on most days since I change to my Nikes for long walks, but they get the bulk of my casual walking.  So I'm guessing that they've already walked over 1000 miles.  They're broken in perfectly.

The treads on the soles are worn down and the outer is separating from the soles.  But I just can't bring myself to throw these shoes out.  I think I'll keep an emergency spare around, and just keep wearing these shoes until they fall apart completely, which I'm fairly confident won't happen for a few more months.  I've already Shoe Goo'd them once and then it separated again.

I'm not sure I can say the same for my headphones.  I've used the same Bose headphones for probably two years and like my shoes, I love these headphones.  I use them on my two hour walks on weekends, and have them on most of the day at work, so they easily put on 24 hours of audio in a week.  That makes 2,500 hours of audio going through these headphones.

They still function perfectly.  But the left ear screen has separated, and the outer layer of the ear pads has pretty much all flaked off.  I normally wouldn't care about this, but the headphones now absorb sweat, which grosses me out, and occasionally I'll walk around little black flecks on my ear from the dilapidated pad.  I think I'll still keep using this for awhile though, but maybe not for exercise.

I don't like buying new things if I have something that works perfectly.  My car has almost 180,000 miles on it and I will probably drive it as long as I can, because I just don't see repair costs exceeding the price of a new car.  I won't replace my cell phone until it breaks.

I wish I could say that I do this primarily because I don't want to live life in a disposable way, though that's definitely part of the equation.  I would also not be ashamed to say that I use things until they're broken because I'm cheap, but that's not really the reason either.

The real reason is that when I find something that's so perfect, it's hard to let it go until it's broken.