Maintenance

The Secret to So Many Things

Stewart Brand, Maintenance Personified

“Every living thing spends a great deal of time and toil in maintaining its own life and the life of systems it depends on. Plants tend the life of the soil they grow in. Beavers maintain their dams and thereby the pond that protects them. Humans maintain their bodies, their vehicles, their homes, and their cities, along with much else.”

— From the introduction to Maintenance: Of Everything by Stewart Brand

In 1968, Stewart Brand and his colleagues published the first Whole Earth Catalog, which was essentially a guide to self-sufficiency during an increasing complicated time. Steve Jobs once called Brand’s catalog a sort of “Google before Google came along.”

Brand is now eighty-seven years old. So, I was surprised in December 2025 to read a laudatory review in the Wall Street Journal of Brand’s latest book, Maintenance: Of Everything, written in his signature style — eccentric but completely accessible.

I was especially pleased because over the past year or two, I have used “maintenance” in my personal lexicon of definitions: “repositioning” instead of retirement; “offspring” instead of children, for those who are now adults (Donald Trump Jr., et al.); and recognizing that calling something “old” was rarely a compliment.

Maintenance is the effort and practice of keeping things in as good shape as possible, beginning most basically with “brush your teeth,” if you want to keep them intact.

But maintenance extends far beyond self-care. My approach is to wrangle the daunting complexities of modern life, to make them manageable when I can. Tim Cook, Jobs’s successor as CEO of Apple, said it well, in reflecting on the company’s fifty-year history: “It’s hard doing simple; it’s easy doing complex.” The writer’s version of this is “If I had more time to finish this, I could make it shorter.”

I’ll get back to health.

But first, technology has become the dominant complicating factor for those of us who remember the before-times of analog. For example, when renting a car, I used to ask for roll-up windows and a simple dashboard. The more widgets, the more distractions, the more things that can go wrong: a loose gas cap and time spent at the dealership rebooting the safety systems.

How to be a safe driver? It took me decades to focus my total attention behind the wheel. The simple seat belt has doubtless saved millions of lives, just pull and click.

In the Vietnam era, GIs wore inexpensive “non-maintainable” watches — just the time, sometimes with the date and a night light. Those that remain are now vintage artifacts, fashionable and, as antiques, expensive.

Devices are indispensable but can be unfathomably complicated, defying even the experts employed by Apple. I recently replaced a pair of lost earbuds with a set that was slipping out of my ears; I went to the Apple store to get a pair with rubber tips. I had the receipt and the buds.

Over the next hour, as many as four Apple employees were deployed to figure out why my phone would not update the “find my phone” capacity, which had to be done for the buds to be exchanged, I was told. Finally, duffer that I am, I pointed out that my phone did not have the storage space for the just-updated app. I admit to leaving feeling superior on behalf of my cohort.

Segueing to health. When the first Covid vaccines for people over sixty-five became available, to get an appointment required uploading the front and back of a Medicare card. Under the circumstances, that requirement seemed to me ridiculous given the target constituency.

I now know how to upload, but I recently had a medical appointment cancelled because I did not meet a deadline in advance for uploading the front and back of my insurance cards. That provider earned a blistering one-star review on Yelp.

Maintenance in health can be manageable. Regular checkups, recognizing that when you take daily meds for high blood pressure or a statin for cholesterol — that does not mean you are frail or failing. Like any machine, the body needs maintenance.

Brand’s book is billed as “Part One” and is derived from a website called “Books in Progress.” The maintenance the book describes is specifically about a round-the-world sailing competition, in which the winner turned out to be the racer who was best at maintenance on the high seas and motorcycle maintenance.

Neither of these are relevant to me, but the principle certainly is, expanding the term “maintenance,” in Brand’s words, “beyond referring only to preventive to stave off the trauma of repair — brushing the damn teeth etc. Let ‘maintenance’ mean the whole grand process of keeping a thing going.

“From that perspective, occasional repair is part of the process. Close monitoring is part of the process. Changing the oil is part of the process. Eventually replacing the thing is part of the process.”

I’ll say here that there are some things that cannot be replaced. Body and soul are two. But they can be maintained.

This is how to buy Stewart Brand’s inspiring book.