Podcast #658: In Praise of Maintenance in a World Obsessed With Innovation
Humans like starting new things much more than looking after older things. This holds true on both an institutional and private level: it’s more interesting to construct a new roadway than to maintain it; more exciting to lose weight than to keep it off. There’s plenty of short-term satisfaction and intrinsic motivation when it pertains to pursuing something unique, but the effort to maintain unsexy upkeep on what we have actually currently got takes genuine intent.
My guest today states we’ve lost that intent and need to revive it. His name is Lee Vinsel and he’s a professor of science, technology, and society, the co-founder of The Maintainers, a research network dedicated to the research study of maintenance, repair, maintenance, and ordinary work, and the co-author of. Lee and I start our conversation with how our cultural focus on development has actually come at the expense of attention paid to maintenance and repair, and yet how talking more about development hasn’t actually caused greater progress. We then enter into the way the necessity of maintenance, repair work, and caretaking has been disregarded in organization and government, developing a scenario where we keep developing brand-new things without purchasing the upkeep of our current infrastructure. From there we rely on the way our all too typical neglect of maintenance applies not just to big institutions, however also our personal lives, as in the areas of home ownership and health. We talk about how there’s less reward nowadays to repair things in our non reusable society where everything is cheap, and stuff is harder to fix, even when we wish to. We end our discussion with how we can revive an upkeep mindset in our culture and individual lives.
If reading this in an email, click the title of the post to listen to the show.
Program Emphasizes
- Why does development get the focus, to the hinderance of upkeep?
- Development vs. innovation-speak
- The difference in between progress and innovation
- The ways in which life hasn’t altered much in the last handful of years
- Why is maintenance ignored?
- The incentivization of short-term gains
- What happened to the greater status of upkeep jobs?
- Why is it so hard to keep our country’s roads kept?
- Ownership, right to repair, and the breakability of things
- Getting to an upkeep mindset
Resources/People/Articles Mentioned in Podcast
- by Walter Isaacson
Get in touch with Lee TheMaintainers.org Lee’s site
Lee on Twitter
Listen to the Podcast! (And do not forget to leave us a review!)
Listen to the episode on a different page.
Download this episode.
Listen ad-free on Stitcher Premium; get a totally free month when you utilize code “manliness” at checkout.
Podcast Sponsors
Click here to see a full list of our podcast sponsors.
Check out the Transcript
Coming soon!
The post Podcast # 658: In Appreciation of Maintenance in a World Consumed With Development appeared first on The Art of Manliness.