Why self-improvement starts with maintenance

{"text":[[{"start":5.75,"text":"It’s the time of year to ponder self-improving resolutions, and I find myself consulting one of my favourite 87-year-olds: the visionary author Stewart Brand. But if Brand is right, perhaps self-improvement isn’t quite the right term; self-maintenance might be better."}],[{"start":24.48,"text":"“You can imagine I have a lot of experience and thoughts concerning self-maintenance these days,” Brand tells me. His new book is Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One. If he survives long enough to add a second part, he plans to include a photo “of all the teeth (natural and implants) that have fallen or been yanked out of my head over the years . . . I kept them all as incentive to keep up with my dental hygiene. It didn’t work.”"}],[{"start":51.83,"text":"Maintenance is not a romantic subject. It can seem like an endless set of repetitive chores in which the best possible result is that you’re back where you started. We can be forgiven for wanting to cut some corners. Brand’s proposed caption for the photo of his double handful of lost teeth: “I brushed when I felt like it.”"}],[{"start":72.47,"text":"Still, the topic is not up for negotiation. Buildings, machinery, vehicles and much more besides will soon become unusable if not cared for. No brushing, no teeth. No maintenance, no machine."}],[{"start":null,"text":"

Politicians hope that whatever is old will somehow keep ticking over without attention. It won’t

"}],[{"start":89.11,"text":"“Don’t have time to schedule maintenance?” asks a cartoon drawn for the US Army, depicting a tyre bouncing to freedom away from a stricken armoured car. “Then your equipment will schedule it for you!”"}],[{"start":101.6,"text":"The military fascination with maintenance is instructive. US Army doctrine uses the awkward but handy term “sustainment” for the broader task of keeping everything going. The old maxim is that an army marches on its stomach; that’s true, and it’s also a form of maintenance."}],[{"start":null,"text":"

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"}],[{"start":123.05,"text":"Dictators disdain maintenance, argues Brand: they prefer the new and spectacular, which is one reason why the Russian military failed to overwhelm Ukraine in 2022. Brand argues that the Ukrainian military had rapidly embraced the improvisation, care and expertise required to repair and maintain their equipment, while the Russians had skimped on basics such as fuel — and tyres, which had been left to rot. When the Russian military machine was put to the test, the wheels fell off."}],[{"start":158.18,"text":"Then again, many democracies do not cover themselves in glory when it comes to maintenance, either. Investment spending is often neglected, and to the extent that politicians do direct money at boosting the stock of capital, they tend to prefer to build something new. They hope that whatever is old will somehow keep ticking over without attention. It won’t."}],[{"start":182.26,"text":"Tempting as it is to blame our governments for all this, not many of us do better in taking responsibility to maintain our minds, our bodies, our relationships and our stuff. We brush our teeth because we fret about stinky breath today; if we were confident of smelling minty-fresh in any case, and thought that tooth-brushing would only pay off in 20 years time, how many of us would bother?"}],[{"start":208.95999999999998,"text":"All the more reason to find something to celebrate in maintenance. There is more to the matter than lost teeth and lost tyres and an endless, thankless grind of make do and mend. One of the best-selling philosophy books of all time, Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, finds a kind of spiritual wisdom in the practice of tending to a motorbike. It is not even the only philosophical tome written about motorcycle maintenance — Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft was a post-meltdown hit in 2009."}],[{"start":245.55999999999997,"text":"Maintenance is meditative — one of Brand’s heroes, the great French philosopher/round-the-world-sailor Bernard Moitessier, told him “My rule is, a new boat every day.” By that he meant that everything on his one-man boat should be as good as new; no repair job was so trivial that it could be postponed."}],[{"start":266.59,"text":"If that seems too earnest, consider three more truths about maintenance. First, it is often collaborative. There is even an ethnography of maintenance culture, and it focuses on conversation. Julian Orr, an anthropologist, lived among the photocopier repairmen of Xerox in the 1980s and 1990s. His book about their culture is titled Talking About Machines, because although these technicians typically worked alone, they loved to gather together and talk about complex repair jobs."}],[{"start":301.22999999999996,"text":"Photocopier repair is beyond most of us, but the same instinct applies whether the problem is a software glitch, a faulty washing machine or a garden pest: we seek advice and compare notes. Many manufacturers of complex products and services will direct troubleshooting requests to online communities of other users. That can feel like a frustrating piece of cost-cutting, but it is also a sensible reflection of the fact that it can take a village to fix a widget."}],[{"start":332.91999999999996,"text":"That reflects a second underrated fact about maintenance: good maintenance is often nothing like the chore of brushing teeth and washing dishes, but an intellectually demanding task requiring knowledge, intelligence and curiosity. To repair a complex object requires patient problem solving and the diligent discovery of hidden trouble. It is an act of mastery."}],[{"start":361.59999999999997,"text":"The third fact follows from the second: because maintenance can require deep expertise, learning to maintain something is empowering. That is true whether the thing in question is a motorcycle or a motorcycle club, or even your own body. Stewart Brand declares that the power to repair is the power to improve. He’s right."}],[{"start":385.63,"text":"It sometimes feels that maintenance is a lost art: so many appliances are miniaturised and mass-produced that they become much simpler to replace than to repair. Still, this technological change cuts both ways:"}],[{"start":403.13,"text":"YouTube and large language models can assist with all manner of household maintenance tasks, and both manuals and spare parts are often easy to obtain online."}],[{"start":414.81,"text":"I can make no claims to be a maintenance guru, and am regularly baffled by the glitches of household appliances. But I’ve noticed that as I’ve passed through my forties and into my fifties, and my body has required increasing efforts at maintenance and repair, I’ve begun to enjoy the confidence boost that comes with understanding where the aches and niggles come from, and how to make them go away again."}],[{"start":442.94,"text":"Set aside all those self-improving resolutions, then. In 2026, I have a shallow-seeming plan with hidden depths: I’m going to try to maintain what I already have."}],[{"start":455.77,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram"}],[{"start":470.77,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1766729502_4928.mp3"}