Maintenance of Everything

Most would probably describe maintenance as a necessary evil. It doesn't involve flashy creativity. It's often extremely rote manual labor performed repeatedly. However, Brand and many of the subjects of this book seem to have fallen in love with it. There's a primeval beauty to doing routine sailboat, motorcycle, or gun maintenance or the like.

The inherent tradeoff in maintenance is this: giving up significantly more time overall to have fewer and less catastrophic failures. Some could argue that maintenance isn't worth it...the labor hours involved in keeping a motorcycle in tip-top shape could probably pay for a new one. Brand makes a compelling argument for why this tradeoff is worth it...it's far better to be prepared when you're on a sailboat in the roaring forties than the alternative.

The book doesn't, however, offer much practical advice on how to incorporate maintenance into our daily routines. Instead, it focuses on examples of maintenance going right or going horribly wrong. It's a fun read and I certainly learned a lot, especially about how shit of a gun the M16 is. That isn't exactly the most useful information though.

My takeaway from the book was that I need to do more maintenance. It did not, however, give great advice on the best methods for maintenance. What's the best frequency for maintenance? When does prepping turn into overkill? At what point does maintenance take away from creativity?

I guess those are questions I'll have to grapple with on my own ;)