LED light bulbs were supposed to last a bajillion hours. When they came out around 2010-ish they were still expensive and I spent many hundreds of dollars replacing every single light bulb in my house, thinking I would basically never have to replace a light bulb again.

It’s 2026 and I now replace the LED bulbs in my house almost as often as I replaced incandescent bulbs. Seriously? LEDs are solid-state technology. There are no moving parts, no gases, no hot filaments…

I understand that it’s probably on purpose; if everyone replaced all the light bulbs in their house with LED bulbs that lasted basically forever then who would buy more light bulbs from light bulb manufacturers.

But it’s still just dumb. Either LED technology is flawed, or our economic system that incentivizes a constant cycle of replacing bulbs is flawed. This should should not exist in 2026.