The r/BuyItForLife subreddit initially started off as a spin-off of r/ShutUpandTakeMyMoney. ‘Buy It For Life’ moderator and founder u/Petrarch1603 was inspired by some of the products they saw there.

“I noticed that sometimes [it featured] useful products that I was interested in buying. Unfortunately, I also noticed a lot of gimmicks and cheaply made products too," they said.

Previously, one of the mods told Bored Panda that some of the most popular items that get posted on the subreddit include: “Stanley Thermos, Darn Tough Socks, Kitchen Aid mixers, Red Wing boots, and pots and pans, particularly cast iron.”

"Most products are built to be as cheap as possible .... and poorly assembled (maybe partly due to planned obsolescence but mostly just due to the fact that people in general like spending less). The products that you see lasting longer are often made of higher quality material and care when built. But they're also priced accordingly,” they shared with us.

One of the main ways that individuals can help protect the environment and fight climate change is by buying new products less frequently, according to The Jump campaign.

As such, buying longer-lasting, more durable products is better not only for your wallet, but it helps put a dent in how much you, as an individual, contribute to the climate crisis. The fewer newer products bought, the less pollution, the fewer carbon emissions.

Recently, Bored Panda spoke about the climate crisis and why some people still don’t believe in climate change with Joseph Pierre, a professor of psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He said that more people understand that climate change is real, however, many feel powerless to stop it.

"We’ve actually seen a significant decrease in climate change denial across the world over the past decade. One reason is that we’ve all been witnessing global warming and its effects firsthand with the hottest temperatures ever recorded in recent years,” he said.

“Another reason is that climate change scientists, governments, and various advocacy groups have also been a lot more vocal about the consensus on this issue, pushing back against the disinformation campaigns of conservative groups and Big Oil," Dr. Pierre told Bored Panda.

"To me, the biggest challenge isn’t converting those who continue to deny anthropogenic [i.e. caused by humans] climate change—it’s how to best translate growing acceptance of anthropogenic climate change into political and legislative action. I think that there are a lot of people who now believe that anthropogenic climate change is real, but feel powerless to do anything about it," he said.

"While we can all do some small part as consumers, the reality is that real change has to come from the fossil fuel industry acting against its immediate self-interests in order to steer us away from future disaster," the professor warned that even though everyone can contribute to the solution, it’s the large multinational corporations that hold the power to make a bigger impact against global warming.

"Like the tobacco industry, there’s good evidence that Big Oil believes that anthropogenic climate change is a reality, but refuses to acknowledge it publicly. That’s not true denial, it’s deception. Which means that change won’t happen unless there’s legislative action on a global scale. If we don’t demand that as citizens and voters, it won’t happen."

Despite more and more people becoming aware of how their daily choices and purchases impact the environment and the planet, some still refuse to believe that people are causing climate change.

"Research has also shown that attitudes about climate change are related to 'naïve realism' based on our own personal experience of the weather. We tend to be insensitive to data from around the world or what’s going on with glacial melts in favor of what we experience in our own lives,” Dr. Pierre told us.

"Personally experiencing record-breaking heatwaves and flooding tends to increase belief in climate change, but cold winters can have the opposite effect,” he said.

“Since we all experience a diurnal variation of at least 20 degrees F’ on any given day, it’s hard to imagine why climate change scientists are saying that a predicted increase of just a few degrees of mean global temperature could spell mass disaster for the planet,” the expert noted that we don’t notice small changes over long periods of time.

Meanwhile, some climate change deniers erroneously believe that there’s disagreements among scientists regarding the ecological crisis and whether it’s manmade.

"This is partially due to lack of awareness about just how many climate change scientists agree that anthropogenic climate change is a reality and the associated misperception that there’s disagreement on this subject. Reviews of published literature, as well as polls, have consistently shown that consensus among climate change scientists about anthropogenic climate change is 97% or higher," he said.

"Although it’s true that some 'scientists' have gone on record refuting anthropogenic climate change, studies have shown that the more expertise on the subject of climate change, the more consensus. In other words, while some who refute climate change might have a science background, most aren’t actually experts—they aren’t climate change scientists who are actively working and publishing research in the field. Note also that the idea that anthropogenic climate change isn’t settled science is a deliberate disinformation strategy that has been funded by the fossil fuel industry going back decades."