It's not a problem with the people as much as it's a side effect of high mobility etc. Your friend might decide they're moving to New Zealand and that's them gone forever. And so it's just sensible not to bet on friends sticking through life. If you value it above all else then there's literally small villages in the middle of nowhere you can pool together and buy.
It's as if we never experienced those ~4B years. Or the ~13B years for the supposed age of the universe. Neither do we experience the ~8 hours of unconsciousness we have every night. We only know how much time has passed based on memory of previous sleeps, how groggy we feel, and how sunny it is behind the curtain.
The status quo belief today seems to be as you said: the nothingness that awaits us after death is also what came before our birth. But what came after the supposed nothingness of pre-birth was your birth, so why wouldn't there be another birthing which becomes you after the nothingness that comes after your death? To believe otherwise is tending towards solipsism. It would be thinking there is something special about "you" and why "you" were born into and inhabit "your" particular region of spacetime. When our feeling of personal identity, the feeling of "you"ness is really mostly an illusion of memory.
Imagine what it was like to be patient HM, with your memory being wiped every ~30 seconds. But imagine even further that you had no long term memories at all. It would be almost as if you were being reborn every time you have a memory lapse.
Paradoxically, back when the market was LESS efficient, the extra slack afforded higher standards because they could overengineer something and still sell it easily.
It always comes down to supply and demand. Supply of generic products like compressors and blenders skyrocketed. Increase the supply enough and you get a race to the bottom. All market inefficiency has been squeezed out of the market. The market has arrived at an equilibrium of making some things just high enough quality that they last longer than a few months while being as cheap as possible. Anyone trying to make something higher quality gets squeezed out. Unless there's also much higher demand to compensate for it.
There is enormous survivorship bias with this 'stuff was way better back in the day' argument - there have always been awful products produced, but those get replaced quickly. An awful fridge from the 1950s was replaced by the 1960s. Engineers weren't deliberately overengineering things back then out of some sense of pride, they were just worse at engineering (and material science) - some things were over-engineered, because we didn't know better ways to solve that problem, and some things were under-engineered for the same reason. I think the increased cost of labor relative to manufactured goods is a big driver of this perceived change, as nobody wants to pay a repair guy $500 to come out and fix their $500 fridge. If the fridge cost $20k we would probably still fix them and they would have a long lifetime (and the repair guy would still charge $500, like an HVAC guy), but there is almost no market for a $20k fridge when a $500 fridge is available.
The market only trends to maximum efficiency if information is sufficiently cheap for enough participants.
Most people have no cost-effective way to find out how long an appliance will last, so the market cannot find the most efficient lifetime for appliances.
People have different ideas of what this common idea of "nothingness" after death even means. I hadnt considered that. But it is perhaps irrelevant, within the framework of thinking I have about these things.
If there's nothing after death. That will last forever. This nothingness will be an infinite nothingness after death. Then, even if the experience of nothingness is timeless/instantaneous, the infinitude of this nothingness becomes qualitatively different. Because you can't have infinity pass instantaneously. Say there's some point after which there's infinitely no life. Then, and only then, this forever of nothingness is as good as experienced. A paradoxically instantaneous yet infinite time of non experience. Essentially a non experience, that we can't experience, forever. At that extreme it becomes akin to an experience. This is how I could agree one could imagine there is nothingness forever after death.
Still there remains the issue of whether or not this nothingness actually occurs. If it's the case that it does, how are we not there already? Almost surely, I'd find myself in the infinitely dead timespan of the universe rather than in the relatively zero sized timespan of the universe in which life exists. The infinitely unconscious tail end of the universe would be like an inescapable trap.
The idea that if infinite experience of any sort exists I would be experiencing it already also requires some justification. To me, I lean more toward the ideas of determinism, and that time isn't so absolute as we tend to experience it. The block universe, perhaps. I think that the theories of relativity lend credence to this seeing as they show us that time is very real but that there is no absolute reference frame from which time is ticking along at the same rate always for everyone within it. Add to these ideas that you could have woken up at any time in the past, as someone living hundreds of thousands of years ago, but did not. Equally, there's no reason why you didn't wake up as anyone in the future. Contentious, I know, but that goes along with my "b theory" belief of time. And we are living in the future, compared to those who found themselves waking up in the past. Why did you wake up into this particular body? Why not one of the past or future? Why not as anybody else? Why did I wake up as me? And then imagine, if ever I "wake", just as I woke into this body, into some experience that is infinite, then I will be trapped forever.
