Maintenance is Underestimated

Tags: musings

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Last year, with a baby on the way, my wife and I decided to move from our apartment into a house. We are now more or less our own landlords, which is nice, but at the same time, we also have to spend substantial amounts of time just maintaining everything. Grass is growing on our terrace; we have to remove it. The heating systems needs a check-up: I schedule an appointment. An outlet is not working properly: let’s call an electrician.

Nothing surprising about this so far, but it got me thinking: all such tasks are incredibly valuable but also time-consuming. It’s tempting to not do them. But, over time, problems would pile up, and then, at some point in the future, several critical systems would be failing. I do not want to have the heater break down in the middle of winter—so I of course do preventative maintenance, and so on.

At some point, weeding the garden, it hit me: most of the things we typically associate with ’the good life’ are about maintenance. You have to maintain your relationships lest they wither. You also need to maintain your (institutional) responsibilities, like checking in with the rules and regulations of your university regularly¹. It is not always the most glamorous work—who likes to clean old code instead of writing new, for instance—but it has to be done. I do not want to be confronted with an overgrown garden of code, or a friendship in shambles because I did not invest in its maintenance.

Of course, not all types of maintenance are equal. Weeding a garden brings me substantially less joy than checking in with a friend. It is, however, also a fact of life that maintaining something good is at least some work. We are primed to think of life happening in a sequence of big, highly important events—and there is certainly a sliver of truth here. Nevertheless, most of life are just ordinary, but equally relevant events, and they should be celebrated as such.

Here’s to maintaining everything, until next time!