Wear parts, to be utterly useless, are the parts that wear. A clutch is a wear part, skate shoes are wear parts, to some degree skate trucks are also wear parts (although one goes through approximately ten times as many decks as trucks).

Binning possessions into wear vs. non-wear parts helps reduce the amount of thinking that goes into taking care of objects. “I want to be less precious about the cars”, I said recently, by which I mean I don’t want to be quaking in my boots over scratches or the paint job getting gummed up, or any of the million other things that could happen when romping the new truck through the wilds of the Oregon high desert.

Does this make the truck a wear part?

My sunglasses are wear parts. Some folks (lookin at my wife on this one) prefer to own 2 pairs of expensive sunnies, cycling back and forth, caring exquisitely for them, and losing track of where they are. Purse? Car? Children’s room? Dedicated sunglasses collection point at house ingress point? Me, I buy sunglasses in batches of 10, throw them in my backpack, in the truck, in the diplomat, in the wife’s car, in all of the totes dedicated to specific genres of adventure sports. And then I simply chuck them when they get too beat up.

Treating the sunglasses as wear parts gives me all the intellectual freedom in the world. Scratches don’t matter, losing them doesn’t matter, putting them in cases doesn’t matter, nothing matters! They’re wear parts! Their entire purpose is to be in reality, ablate over time, and ultimately be disposed of. They are born, mature, and die, just like anything else.

What about nice sunglasses though? More pertinently, what about really nice skiing googles? Googles can run into the hundreds of dollars (almost justifiably! For anti-fog, comfort, field of view, and fabrication quality in general), but if we treat them so very preciously, we’ll find ourselves doing dumb shit like changing stance while ripping through the trees in a (I contest) vain effort to keep them from getting scratched up, when at least for ski goggles, their entire purpose is to protect our eyes from foreign objects coming in faster than the biology can counter.

Everything wears, ultimately. You and I are wear parts in our species’ reproductive engine. The truck itself is a wear part over a long enough time horizon, and will eventually need replacing as well.

Best to not get bent out of shape over a few scratches on the brand new car. It too will die (or be covered in glitter paint by reckless 5-year old terrorists) just like everything else. Quit stressing over the petty shit and go enjoy your life. Channel that OCD into productive outlets.