Here's a cute one, courtesy of our fallen hero Tim Harford (tl;dr: he used to be great and edgy, now he's bland and irrelevant, perfect material for retirement).
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.
Maintenance is caring, and that's as true, he says, for the body as it is machinery or even armies.
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.
That's as good of a H&F new year's resolution as we're reasonably going to get. Workout is maintenance: drop and give me 20.
"To repair a complex object requires patient problem solving and the diligent discovery of hidden trouble. It is an act of mastery.""To repair a complex object requires patient problem solving and the diligent discovery of hidden trouble. It is an act of mastery."
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.
GO FORTH AND, UM, MAINTAIN YOSELFS!
I dunno if it's always been this way but it feels like maintenance is harder than building. Companies don't repair their products anymore, it's just throw away and buy a new one
it's discussed in the piece.
Usually, because make new stuff is cheaper than repairing, it stops making sense. Yes-yes, environmentalism, and yesyes, don't waste for no reason... but like, why bother?
I guess it'll take the cost of replacing a gadget to exceed the cost of repairing it. Which likely means we are in some kind of environmental doomsday scenario?
Or, as in my comment we need some major advancement on reusability tech
Or, we're just in a temporary period of relatively cheap material inputs. If that flips, landfills may become future mines.
Sounds like a good setup for a scifi
It's mostly that plastics are cheap, right?
Easy enough to imagine energy demand rising to the point where plastics are no longer an economical use of petroleum, at least for all the things it's used for now.
I think y'all would love Steward Brand's book in progress.
Have a chapter
There's more but I'm on mobile.
that's literally what the Harford article is about :)
Super interesting and no surprise we decided to just stop using paper instead of dealing with all that.
Human time is so valuable. I bet repairs would become normal again if they could reduce the human time involved in the process.
Technology for reusability just hasn't seem to have advanced very much. I wonder what the underlying incentive reason is for that. Is it hard to appropriate the surplus generated from reusability tech?
I'm thinking that there's less uniformity in how things break than there is in how they're built, so it's harder to automate a repair process.
archived link