After We Automate the Rest

For centuries, we’ve gotten better at being productive. Time became a commodity. Factories gave us assembly lines. We streamlined processes to create interchangeable parts and interchangeable people. We created an unprecedented amount of wealth and stuff.

Now the culture is looking to automate the rest.

The capitalist gets their dream. What then for the rest of us?

There are many answers, but one that isn’t discussed enough is maintenance—not creating something new, but tending what we already have.

When we hear the term "maintenance," it often makes many of us flinch. But we need to be clear: the cost of servicing what we’ve built and the cost of caring for what we love are not the same thing.

Servicing appears as a line item in the spreadsheet.

Caring isn’t.

We keep automating the servicing and assuming we’ve automated the work. But the part that mattered was never the part we were tracking in the first place.

Better systems don’t eliminate maintenance. They change the kind we get to do. Caring is what you do because the thing matters to you, not because the system requires it.

So the real question isn’t what work is left for us. It’s this: What do we get to maintain?