I honestly don’t know where expired products end up.

In theory, they should be removed, destroyed, recycled, clearly marked as no longer suitable to enter the human body.  

But that’s only the theory.

I’ve seen things that weren’t so clean.  Products close to expiration quietly re-labeled,  old dates peeled off, new ones pasted on,  as if nothing ever happened.

That’s when I realized something unsettling:  very often, what we buy isn’t the product itself, but peace of mind.

We trust labels.  We trust printed dates.  We trust systems.  We trust that “this won’t go wrong.”  So we pay, and our anxiety dissolves.

But does the product actually become safer because of that?

Expiration isn’t a sudden collapse.  It’s a slow drift away from a safety boundary.  Yet we compress that entire process into a single number,  a line of ink, a date.

As long as that number still sits in the future,  we pretend nothing has changed.

What’s more unsettling is that we often consume expired things "without knowing",  not because we’re greedy,  but because we trusted the system.

If even dates can be rewritten,  what exactly are we trusting?

I’m not saying everything is unsafe.  I’m not accusing everyone who sells things.  I’m simply realizing this: "Our lives are built on countless invisible assumptions."

We assume someone is checking for us.  We assume the process is clean.  We assume no one would quietly push risk a little further down the line.

But expired things never disappear.  They just change form and continue living among us.

So I no longer chase absolute reassurance.  Because reassurance is the easiest thing to sell.

I leave room for uncertainty now.  For alertness.  For saying, “I actually don’t know.”

Maybe real safety doesn’t come from a printed date,  but from admitting this simple truth:

This world doesn’t offer that many guarantees.



—— XC Scribbles · 壹佰零肆 CIV ⏳