Maintenance

"There's birth, there's death, and in between there's maintenance." Tom Robbins

Maintenance. I hate maintenance. What is maintenance? Everything that we have to do to maintain the accepted status quo.

Take dusting. Is there a more boring fruitless activity on earth? You dust, you wait, the dust returns. All housework falls under maintenance: dusting, vacuuming, doing dishes, everything cleaning related. All that you accomplish is the forlorn opportunity to repeat the process endlessly. Ad nauseum. Until death you do depart.

Or personal hygiene? How much of your life has been spent brushing your teeth, taking showers, shaving? A whole lot. Yet unless you are a hermit, maintain you must. Given all our wonderful technology why can't we invent self-cleaning teeth. How could that be harder than going to the moon? After all, we've had self-cleaning ovens forever.

Washing clothes, cutting grass, changing oil: all meaningless maintenance. Do you really enjoy any of it?

I recently joined a gym. You might think that is some kind of meaningful activity. I work hard and regularly there. I already see and feel results. But why? At 62, it is unlikely that I will end up on the cover of Men's Fitness, that 23 year old super models will fling themselves upon my buff carcass or that I'll win an Olympic gold.

Nope. It's really just a pathetic attempt to stave off inevitable decrepitude; to maintain my faltering body for a while longer. Maintenance. That's all it is.

I think that (if we think) the older we get the more meaningless maintenance becomes. We know that the end of maintenance is death. We know it. Yet we maintain, because it is expected, because we always have. And we always will.

One virtue of minimalism is that the less space and stuff you have, the less maintenance you have to perform. Yes!

Mike