How long
How long things stayed
Items still in use are older than items that have stopped. Why that is not the paradox it sounds like.
What a thing's life looks like
A median of six years for things in use, four for things that stopped. The oldest is nineteen years old. The record has no stopping dates, and this page says what that costs.
Six years against four
Things still in use are older than the working lives of things that stopped. The figure by kind, and what makes the gap.
The survivor's paradox
Things still in use are older than the working lives of things that stopped. Why that is arithmetic rather than a finding about equipment.
The oldest thing in the record
A desk bought new in 2007, still in daily use after nineteen years. Three objects are over fifteen years old and all three are furniture.
The shortest life
A keyboard bought new and abandoned in two months. The only object in the record whose stopping reason is something about the object itself.
Arrival years, and what 2019 and 2021 did
Fifty-two objects arrived in 2019 and fifty in 2021. The shape of the distribution, and why almost none of it is a finding.
What a median age cannot tell you
Six years is a real figure from a recorded field. Five things it still cannot answer, and the one field that would have fixed all five.
How long is not how good
The record's longest-lived objects are the ones with nothing in them to go wrong. That is a fact about categories, not an order of merit.