Maintenance: Debt or Practice?

To most of us, maintenance is a chore—an obligation, the thing we have to deal with. Since attention is scarce, we tend to work overtime to avoid creating any more of it than we have to, writing ourselves out of systems, projects, and commitments. But as we become more hands-off, the maintenance doesn’t disappear; it compounds and compounds until maintenance is perceived as a new form of debt.

Debt is a moral story that reshapes who you believe yourself to be. Are you someone who pays your debts or not?

But debt and care are not the same thing—we just tend to entangle them around the same act. Which story you choose to tell here matters.

There's an alternative:

Maintenance is also a practice—a story of something we get to do. It’s a way of showing care for what's working, a way of signaling that we understand a system well enough to maintain it. You can’t actually care for something you don’t understand; you can only go through the motions. Real care requires getting close enough to know how the thing works.