On Maintenance

Important, but boring.

Introduction

The world runs because of people maintaining everything.

Despite never being at the forefront, it is crucial and pervasive.

Here, I reflect more about it.

Maintenance is not eventful.

Maintenance is boring. It is a duty I uphold, but I much prefer spending time working, having fun or chilling to brushing my teeth or going to the toilets.

There's some fog around maintenance. When I was a child, people did not discuss it much. I also did not often see it in video games, aside from the occasional "Upkeep" dynamic, which is just a cost in coins you pay every turn, more than rituals like brushing your teeth. Not only in video games, but in all types of fiction, I saw a lot of building or destruction but no maintenance.

This makes sense. Maintenance is painful in video games and does not make for a good story. While a good story shows the world changing or character development, maintenance is about putting energy into having things not change. It is an anti-story.

As much as people care about order in fiction, it is about enforcing rules or a hint that they are villains. It is not really about doing the daily nitty-gritty needed to maintain it.

In White Mirror, instead of presenting a new piece of technology and how it's good, they could do at least one episode focusing on maintenance. They could show people who solve day-to-day problems to ensure that the tech stays good, both on a technical and social level. It might also need to show a time-lapse of what happens when something is left without maintenance. I'm not sure.

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A friend of mine got diabetes young. He felt terrible about it, having to keep track of his blood sugar levels and inject insulin regularly.

We discussed it, and I compared it to flossing and taking showers. Different people need different maintenance regimes: some need more sports, some need to floss more often, and he needs to keep track of his blood sugar levels.

He told me later that this helped him emotionally.

It made it easier for him because maintenance is a frame where you don't need to struggle or fight. You just do it. It is meaningless. Cost of Doing Business.

The same thing that makes it easy to not think about and Just Do It makes for an uninteresting story.

Maintenance is a tax on existence.

Dogs think humans are gods to them, because we bring them food.

Cats think they are gods to humans, because we bring them food.

Regarding institutions, humanity moved from a dog-like mentality to a cat-like mentality. If we were to pick between having a duty toward our government and our government having a duty toward us, which one would be the easiest to live with? Obviously, the latter! Who wants to live with a life-long government-sized burden?

When building something, it feels epic! 0 to 1! Wooo! It feels like winning; we are imposing our will onto the world, shaping it to fit our desires.

Then, we experience the hedonic treadmill. After the quick burst of excitement, what we have built is now a given; it is the new normal.

Any maintenance cost now feels terrible. It feels different from all the efforts we put into building the thing. It feels like meaningless pain. How do we get rewarded after paying the costs of bringing the thing to fruition? With a new cost until the end of its life!

We should think of maintenance as a cost centre from the start. Whenever a project is started, we should keep in mind its direct costs and lifetime costs. Businesses routinely do this and yet regularly underestimate these costs. Governments and individuals underestimate these costs even more often.

At a personal level, this might be demotivating. Starting a project is already hard enough; thinking about a new downside would make it even harder.

This demotivation is good. If someone gets demotivated just because a new project feels like too much, sure, it might be because they are depressed, and a white lie might help them. But most likely, it is because they already have too many things going on! This is a message from their emotions telling them it smells like a bad idea!

There are certainly wrong reasons to be demotivated. For instance, "Think of what people will say about me?? Imagine how much fun they would make of me if I failed!!"

But "Upon consideration of Maintenance Costs, it felt like it was not worth it" is one of the right reasons. It is a meaningful choice.

Maintenance is a tax on existence. When we consider it seriously, we realise that some things should not be brought up to existence. Some things should be killed. Although it is a red flag, sometimes, things should even be left for dead rather than outright killed.

Maintenance is Caring

Maintenance is a tax on existence. If you flip it around, it means that maintenance is what one must pay to keep something alive.

In my view, maintenance is what caring means in practice. It does not mean feeling bubbly toward someone. It means putting in some share of the work needed to help them survive and thrive as human beings.

Similarly, this is what it means to care about politics. It is not being passionate about it or having lots of feelings. It is actually putting in the work to help politics not degenerate and decay.

When we are poor and in bad health, we can not afford to care about too many things. It is a fact of life. But most healthy and comfortable people I know do not care about that many things either. They maintain very few things.

When we care about something, we maintain it. And when we don't care about something, we let it die. It's as simple as that.

Everything needs maintenance.

Bodies

We are complex machines.

We need energy and matter from oxygen, nutrients, water and more.

We need to evacuate waste through shitting and exhaling.

We need to stay clean and shiny through showering and flossing.

We need to regulate our temperature with clothes and sweat.

We need to exercise regularly to maintain our cardio, strength, and flexibility.

We suffer chip damage, get sick, and have accidents. We must recover from all of that.

That's a lot of maintenance, which means a lot of caring for ourselves and our bodies.

Relationships

We change, the world changes, our understanding of the world changes, and the meaning of our words and commitments changes.

Even without any perturbation, our relationships need upkeep simply because we change. In concrete terms, we need to communicate to see what the relationship means as its participants and the world change.

Otherwise, the relationship enters stasis, and the people in it drift away from each other. Things become uncomfortable, and at some point, they become meaningless.

—

Another reason for maintenance is that all relationships face perturbations.

We can't read each other's minds, and we do not have time to explain everything. So, there will always be misunderstandings.

We are also not perfect beings. We have bad days. And sometimes, our stress spills over.

Trust is what lets us tank those. But even if we tank it, it adds up. And here, maintenance looks like caring through love, fun, communication and little acts of kindness.

Infrastructure and Institutions

It is often tempting to invest in infrastructure.

Roads, electrical networks, schools, hospitals, waste management, fire stations, internet access, and more. More seems better, and it seems to be the best type of long-term investment one could make.

But all of this adds up. Not only in terms of money, but in terms of people. For each project like that, there needs to be at least one person who cares.

Someone who will care enough to keep those projects up-to-date with the social and technological changes of the times, who will care enough to deal with chip damage and direct attacks.

Most importantly, someone who cares and is as ambitious as the people who created the project in the first place.

Wedon'ttWe don't have what it takes to reliably find such people. Given this, I am afraid of big infrastructure projects. Even if there's a budget at a given time to make them happen, I expect there will be no one there at the end. A captain who could steer the ship and sink with it if needs be.

I believe that Public Institutions are decaying right now. Not because of anything nefarious but just because they require a lot of maintenance. While we have their financial budget covered through high taxes, we don't have them covered with great people.

Laws and Regulations

Passing new laws and regulations costs a lot in maintenance.

Many professionals must become acquainted with them: judges, lawyers, paralegals, and cops. The law grows bigger. Learning about it, applying it, all of this becomes more costly.

People become more disconnected from The Law. It grew bigger, as did the extent to which they are ignorant of it. This is very bad, given that Ignorantia Juris Non Excusat, or less pompously, not knowing the law does not make you innocent of violating it.

More concretely, we are all in irregular situations because the law is so vast that we all constantly break it without knowing it. Every time we pass a new law, we make this worse.

And, possibly, the worst of all. It is now common knowledge that the law covers this new field.

Let's say school fights became a big deal in our country. People felt bad, so we decided to regulate them, with different penalties depending on who instigated the fight.

This now means that it falls under the realm of the whole judicial apparel to adjudicate school fights and investigate who started them. Most likely, this means that cops would then need to routinely interrogate middle schoolers, which has gigantic costs.

Memories

Memories decay.

The palest ink is better than the best memory.

Maintaining a book, a USB device, or a file replicated 10 times in the cloud is much easier than just a memory.

Similarly, skills decay without regular practice.

Common Factors

There are two types of factors that are common in all those examples.

External factors: Weathering and Change.

The world is not made of fluffy cushions. Merely interacting with it weathers most things.

Furthermore, the world constantly evolves. Just keeping up with it requires maintenance.

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Internal factors: Entropy and Complexity.

Even absent interactions with the world at large, there is a cost to enforcing and maintaining order.

The more complex an order is, the higher the cost. This is another reason why complexity should be taxed. An example of taxing complexity would be having legislators read together all laws at least once every year.

Conclusion

I wanted to discuss many more examples of things that require maintenance, such as traditions never being updated, being a citizen, software rotting, machines and engines, and more.

But I'll leave it at that for now. Let's move on to the next topic.

Cheers, and have a nice day!