Maintenance of Everything

January 5, 2026 · By Steward Brand · Rating: 5/5

I’ve punctured my bike tyre at least 5 times in the past year. It’s excessive. I have a faint suspicion that I’m generationally cursed ; one of my ancestors slighted a local witch, and now I have to suffer the fate of constant flat tyres.

Embarrassingly, it took until the 3rd flat, that I decided ‘I should probably learn how to fix this myself’. Just a few days ago, I suffered another flat tyre, this time to the back wheel, which involves taking the wheel off the chain, something I hadn’t done before.

I decided to get that repaired in the shop - it took the guy around 15 minutes to pop in a new inner tube, and I was on my way.

But the universe has been trying to teach me a lesson. After a day of riding , I suffered another flat tyre to the back wheel.

The natural order of things is flat tyres. Decay.

This is what ‘Maintenance of Everything’ by Stewart Brand is about; encapsulated in the very first quote in the book : “You should consider that the essential art of civilisation is maintenance”.

Here are a few points I took away.

The natural order of things is decay, from the microscopic to the macroscopic. Atoms, DNA, cells, bodies, vehicles, homes, societies, software, companies, countries, planets, stars, solar systems, galaxies, universes. A constant is that we live in a river of impermanence, and that impermanence unfortunately involves flat tyres. Entropy is always increasing
But maintenance is what keeps life going. Atoms form stable isotopes. DNA repairs itself, cells evolved to survive in their environment, bodies have a whole host of mechanisms that are preventing you from dying. Life is what locally reverses entropy. We actively put in effort to bring order to systems - to keep the damn thing going!
Maintenance is tiresome and often too easy to neglect - “brush the damn teeth, change the damn oil”. It’s repetitive, ungratifying a lot of the time and neverending. You never get to the bottom. And importantly, “the necessity of maintenance accumulates invisibly and gradually”. If you neglect the invisible work, one day everything just breaks. So in maintenance, one is doing shadow work.
Systems don’t degrade linearly. There is a cliff. Things seems fine, you can put off the work, but one day, the bridge eventually collapses.
At the heart of it is a great paradox : “maintenance is absolutely necessary and maintenance is optional… defer now, regret later, neglect kills”.
Maintenance is invisible. We celebrate ‘builders’, but the vital work of maintenance is often forgotten about. The person who keeps the sewage system up and running is not given any awards.
Maintenance involves accumulated embodied knowledge - doing the thing! You learn only by tackling the problem head on.
Maintenance is a form of sustained attention - which is care. I think about this in relationships, which are also dynamic evolving systems - gardens of shared experience. They like any physical system, need watering, love and attention.
Similarly, maintenance reveals what you actually value. What someone takes the time to maintain, it tells you more about their priorities than any words. Take the example of the person who says they care about their partner, but put little time or attention into the relationship.
Rituals are a maintenance process for meaning creation. Religious rituals, family traditions, national holidays - they are crucial in maintaining shared identities, values and culture. This is why you need to celebrate your birthdays. When communities stop gathering and performing rituals, that is a society in the midst of a meaning crisis.
No-one is above it. Entropy doesn’t care how important you think you are, your still subject to the laws of decay. You’ve got to brush your teeth. It’s why ‘sweeping the floor’ is seen as a spiritual - you need to do it everyday! The dust doesn’t care if you’re the CEO.

A few of my favourite lines of the book now :

Soften the paradox, and the misbehaviour it encourages, by expanding the term maintenance beyond referring to only preventative maintenance to stave off the trauma of repair – brushing the damn teeth etc. Let maintenance mean the whole grand process of keeping a thing going….

When you take responsibility for something, you enter into a contract to take care of it. If it’s a child, to keep it fed. If it’s a knife, to keep it sharp.

What this book reminds me is that there is nothing optional about maintenance. Maintenance is the process of keeping the thing going.

It’s fundamentally about care - by doing the invisible work, you show that you care about the system - be it your body, your society or your bike.

If we neglect habits, rituals, institutions that foster care, don’t be surprised if one day everything just breaks.