The Inexorable March of Maintenance
I mentioned in my previous post about getting the exterior of my house painted this summer. That prompted some assorted thoughts about the topic of maintenance in general.
As mentioned, I had the exterior of my house painted this summer. It is an old house (built in the 1930s) with wooden siding, and a lot of the paint was peeling. The most obvious benefit of a fresh paint job is to the appearance, but obviousness doesn't imply importance; the most important benefit is protecting the wooden siding from weathering. In fact, back when I bought this house, I had to have the siding replaced entirely on one side (with southern exposure, making it the most weathered), so I'm hoping that a fresh coat of paint can extend the longevity of the rest of the external siding. This principle applies far beyond wooden siding: proper coatings, reapplied as necessary, can greatly extend the life of underlying assets. The famous, UNESCO-listed, rail bridge over the Firth of Forth in Scotland has lasted for 135 years. There's a story about it that painters used to get to one end of it and then return to the other and immediately begin repainting. According to Wikipedia, this story isn't literally true, but it did employ full-time painters as part of its maintenance crew.
This painting job was bigger than most household maintenance tasks (but also has a longer interval before it needs to be done again then most): I got competing quotes and when I selected one it took a crew of 2-3 people showing up for around a week. It absorbed my attention much more than most maintenance does, and got me thinking about maintenance in general. Some of my recent reading–the previous theme I did about Industry, and the current one I'm on about Knowing–also has some tie-ins to the topic of maintenance. It's something that is probably not thought about enough, so I decided to write up some musings about it as a blog post. Maybe it will spark some discussion.
Another piece of maintenance that I've been confronted with this summer and fall is yard/garden waste. My house has an established garden from the previous owner with numerous shrubs, perennials, some trees, and a hedge. Before having a garden to maintain, my mental concept of gardening was the work involved to get things to grow. What I'd never really stopped to consider--at least not to work out the implications--is that plants just keep growing and growing, so that a lot of the work with an established garden is in pruning and removing the excess. I haven't fully kept up with this, so some parts are starting to look quite overgrown. In Harvesting the Biosphere, Vaclav Smil provides various estimates for net primary productivity (NPP), including a value of 400 g C/sq. m for eastern North America (this is the low end of the range he gives, but eastern N.A. includes a lot of places with a longer growing season than we get where I live). Doing some quick area measurements on Google Maps, the green areas of my small yard (i.e. not house, deck, or driveway) are around 220 sq. m. This implies an annual growth of 88 kg as carbon; since cellulose is the major building block of plants and it is 44% carbon by weight, this equates to 200 kg/yr dry weight. I don't know exactly how much yard waste bags can hold, but I doubt it's more than 10 kg, so that means I should be filling at least 20 yard waste bags per year just to keep up. In past years, I've typically filled 5-10 bags so it makes sense from this calculation that my shrubs have been demanding more and more space.
Painting is maintenance. Sufficiently aggressive pruning is maintenance. Car oil changes and furnace filter changes are maintenance. Keeping bike tires properly inflated and the chain oiled; sharpening knives and chisels; replacing lightbulbs and batteries as needed; emptying ash from the barbecue--all maintenance. Cleaning tasks, even those as quotidian as laundry and dishwashing, are a vital element of maintenance. But beyond tangible physical stuff, there's plenty more that requires maintenance of some sort: relationships; skills; health/fitness; social norms; law & order; databases and filing systems (keeping them organized, removing duplicates, checking the validity of labels); bodies of knowledge; accounts/memberships; registration of ownership and payment of associated bills and taxes.
Like the Forth Bridge, things can last when they are properly taken care of. Unfortunately, maintenance is easy to overlook. It is tedious, boring, or just out-of-sight-and-out-of-mind. This forum thread has some examples of tasks that we should be doing but aren't. All of this stuff is unglamourous and underappreciated, but when it isn't done stuff wears out faster or is more likely to fail when you need it.
The more you have (in terms of stuff, but not only stuff), the more there is to maintain. For example, it is commonly observed that a bigger house means more rooms to clean. Increased complexity of what you have also adds to the maintenance burden. A generation or so ago, someone could do most of their own vehicle maintenance with some basic mechanical skills and a reasonably-stocked toolbox; newer vehicles have a lot more electrical and electronic components (they don't need attention as often as items like brake pads, tires, belts, and fluids, but that is not to say they never do) and the newest ones even have software updates to deal with, while still having mechanical systems to maintain. It now takes a wider array of skills and tools to handle this maintenance. As the quantity and complexity of what you have increases, so does your maintenance burden. There are only so many ways to handle this. One is to try to keep up with it yourself. Eventually you'll reach a saturation point where you can't take anything new on, at least without dropping something else. Another way is to pay someone else to do it. This is certainly the default approach for organizations, and is practical for individuals and families (assuming they can afford it) for some things, such as taking a car to a garage for an oil change or hiring a landscaping crew to mow your lawn. However, because of the high cost of labour in our society, anything less than a major appliance is difficult to justify hiring someone to take care of. A service call by a skilled tradesperson is more likely to be over $100 than under, so who wants to pour that kind of money into something that's not a multiple of that? This brings us to the third way, which is to skip maintenance. This is a large part of the rise of throw-away culture. Manufacturers know that few consumers will do any maintenance, so products are designed to be used until they wear out, and then be replaced. For example, "fast fashion" is in part due to very few purchasers being willing or able to do any mending, and tailor's rates being high enough to only make sense for special items like suits and wedding dresses. On the other hand, when you can count on someone lubricating, sharpening, re-painting, changing gaskets, and so on, things can be designed to last much longer.
I believe the burden of maintenance is part of what makes minimalism appealing to people.
I pointed out above that it's not just tangible/physical things that require maintenance, and I want to unpack that a bit more by looking at some examples. Most professional credentials have to be maintained. You need to complete and log some annual continuing education hours, pay a membership fee, and submit some renewal paperwork. Skills need to be used to stay sharp; don't go too long without a project on the go that uses them. Webpages gradually experience link rot when they aren't actively updated. Other sites that they link to may cease to exist, change their domain, or substantially reorganize; even on this blog, some internal links from posts in 2019 and earlier no longer work because an update to the Ghost platform changed the way that relative URLs were handled and I don't have the time to go back and fix all the places where that occurred. Public order needs some level of enforcement to be preserved. This is the idea behind broken-window policing, to fight vandalism and petty crime so as not to look like a place where someone could get away with a major crime. For a lot of legal rights and privileges, it's a good idea to periodically exercise or demonstrate them so that it is remembered that you have them. An interesting historical example of this is the English tradition of the "beating of the bounds" which involved a community walk around the borders of a parish and pointing out the boundary markers. Children would hit these markers with tree branches (or in some versions, get hit with tree branches at the markers, or bopped against the marker itself) to create a lasting impression that would stick in their memories decades later when the older people who knew where the boundary was had all passed on. The key thing was that the boundary, and the community rights that went with it, was regularly asserted and kept fresh in living memory.
This leads to another aspect of maintenance that I want to explore a bit in this post, which is how it looks at the organizational level as opposed to the individual or household level. In an organization–at least a large enough one–maintenance can be made into someone's primary responsibility, with staff and a budget allocated to work on it. When it's a continuous, ongoing process instead of discrete tasks that may or may not get remembered every six months (or whatever frequency it's due) by someone with a lot of other responsibilities, inertia helps with maintenance instead of against it. Contrast the permanent full-time painters working on the Forth Bridge to changing your own furnace filter. There's also a unique way that maintenance poses a challenge to organizations. Most organizations (this is easiest to see with companies, but applies more generally) start out with a founder who has a vision to build something. As this is successful and the organization grows, however, there's an increasing amount of time, effort, money, and attention that needs to be put into maintaining what's been built already, rather than continuing to build and neglecting what exists. That is, as organizations get bigger, they need to shift more attention to maintenance; they can't stay in startup/founder mode indefinitely. This takes a different mindset and different skillset than building something in the first place. The transition from the first leader of an organization to the second is a fraught time because it can be hard for the founder to select and mentor a successor with such a necessarily different focus, to be a maintainer not (just) a builder. Apple Inc. going from Steve Jobs to Tim Cook is an example of this kind of transition. There's a very interesting essay on "The Succession Problem" by Samo Burja, which I'm working on a post about so I expect to have more to say about this challenge of keeping organizations going across generations–of which keeping up with maintenance plays no small part.
To round out this post, I'll explore some quotes and expressions about maintenance, and then offer some suggestions for further reading. On the heels of my previous post, one that comes to mind is "busy beavers" (also a fascinating mathematical function). One of the things that keeps beavers busy is maintenance. They instinctively rush to the sound of running water (e.g. a dam breach) to take action. Then there's the proverb "a stitch in time saves nine": maintenance that is neglected leads to more work in the long run. Or one of my favourite capital-P Proverbs is 14:4,
Where no oxen are, the manger is clean,
But much revenue comes by the strength of the ox.
We'd like things to be one-and-done, but most things that are profitable (i.e. oxen) come hand-in-hand with ongoing work (i.e. keeping mangers clean).
Here's a very topical quote from G.K. Chesterton (previously shared here):
If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.
For further reading on maintenance, this blog post is brief but insightful. There's also an upcoming book due to be released early next year called Maintenance of Everything by Stewart Brand. I've preordered it so a review may eventually show up on this blog. I'm looking forward to reading it because like I said in the second paragraph, maintenance is something we probably could benefit from thinking more about. Especially the maintenance of intangible things like culture and community.