The Philosophy of Maintenance | Research

Maintenance is unfashionable. We celebrate creation—the new product, the disruptive startup, the original work. We neglect the quieter work of keeping things going. But maintenance is where most of life happens. Buildings stand because someone inspects them. Roads remain drivable because crews fill cracks. Your car runs because you change the oil.

This is not glamorous. It is essential.

Pirsig: Quality as Care

Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) is ostensibly about a cross-country motorcycle trip. It’s actually about how we relate to the things we use.

Pirsig distinguishes two modes of understanding: classical (analytical, rational, concerned with underlying form) and romantic (intuitive, aesthetic, concerned with surface appearance). Most people fall into one camp or the other. The romantic sees the motorcycle as a beautiful machine and resents the greasy work of maintaining it. The classical thinker sees systems and functions but may miss the joy of the ride.

Pirsig argues for integration. The person who maintains their own motorcycle—who understands both its beauty and its mechanics—achieves something neither mode offers alone. They achieve Quality.

Quality, for Pirsig, precedes the subject/object split. It’s the pre-intellectual recognition of rightness or wrongness, the sense that something is good before you can articulate why. And Quality emerges most clearly in care.

“When one isn’t dominated by feelings of separateness from what he’s working on, then one can be said to ‘care’ about what he’s doing. That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one’s doing.”

The motorcycle maintained with care runs better than the motorcycle serviced by a disinterested mechanic. Not because the work is technically superior, but because the caring person notices things. They see the slightly loose bolt, hear the faint knock, feel the subtle vibration. Care produces attention, and attention produces quality.

Crawford: The Cognitive Demands of Repair

Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009) extends Pirsig’s intuitions into explicit argument. Crawford—a philosopher with a Ph.D. from Chicago who left a think-tank job to repair motorcycles—challenges the assumption that “knowledge work” is inherently superior to manual work.

His thesis: skilled manual labor requires sophisticated cognition. The mechanic diagnosing an engine problem engages in genuine thinking—hypothesizing, testing, revising. The work is intellectually demanding in ways that much office work is not.

“Crawford defines craftsmanship as ‘the desire to do something well, for its own sake.’”

Crawford argues that we’ve made a category error. We treat “working with your hands” as less cognitively demanding than “working with your mind,” when in fact the best manual work is deeply cognitive, and much knowledge work is routine and degraded.

More importantly, repair work offers something increasingly rare: direct feedback. You fix the motorcycle; it runs or it doesn’t. There’s no ambiguity, no office politics, no performance review. The world pushes back, and you learn.

This matters psychologically. Crawford draws on the concept of agency—the sense of being an effective actor in the world. Repair work cultivates agency. You diagnose a problem, intervene, and verify the result. The loop is tight and honest.

By contrast, much modern work—especially in large organizations—offers diffuse responsibility and unclear outcomes. You contribute to a spreadsheet that feeds into a process that might affect a decision. The causal chain is too long for genuine agency.

The Stewardship of Objects

Maintenance changes your relationship to things.

The economist frames ownership as a bundle of rights: use, exclude, transfer. The maintainer frames ownership differently: as a relationship of care extending over time. You don’t just have the object; you tend it.

This relationship was once common. People sharpened their knives, repaired their shoes, maintained their tools. Objects were expensive; labor was (relatively) cheap. It made economic sense to keep things working.

The economics have inverted. Objects are cheap; labor is expensive. A new toaster costs less than an hour of a repair technician’s time. It makes economic sense to throw away and replace.

But something is lost in this shift. The philosopher Mark Thomas Young calls it the “stewardship of objects”—the practice of caring for things over their lifespan. When we default to replacement over repair, we lose:

Knowledge: How things work, how to fix them, how to judge quality
Skill: The manual dexterity and diagnostic ability that maintenance builds
Connection: The relationship between person and object that care creates
Meaning: The satisfaction of keeping something going

The designed-for-disposal object is designed to be alien. You’re not meant to open it, understand it, or fix it. You’re meant to use it until it fails, then buy another.

Design for Maintenance

The opposite approach exists. Some products are designed for repair: modular construction, standard fasteners, available parts, published service manuals.

When an object is designed for maintenance, ownership changes character. The object becomes a long-term asset, a relationship, not a transaction. You learn its quirks. You fix what breaks. It develops patina—the marks of use and care that make an object distinctly yours.

The “Buy It For Life” (BIFL) philosophy codifies this preference. Instead of buying cheap and replacing often, buy quality and maintain indefinitely. Key principles:

Durability: Materials that resist wear—leather over plastic, metal over particle board
Repairability: Screws instead of glue, modular components, available parts
Timeless design: Classic aesthetics that don’t date quickly
Strong warranties: Companies that stand behind their products

BIFL isn’t about buying the most expensive option. Expensive doesn’t mean durable. It’s about analyzing construction: Can this be taken apart? Can components be replaced? Does the company offer repair services?

The BIFL mindset also requires active commitment. “Buy It For Life” doesn’t mean “Buy It And Forget It.” Durable goods require care. The cast iron skillet rusts without seasoning. The leather boots crack without conditioning. The knife dulls without sharpening.

Maintenance is the price of ownership.

The Ethics of Care

Feminist philosophers have developed an “ethics of care” that emphasizes relationships, context, and responsiveness over abstract principles. Though originally applied to human relationships, the framework extends to our relationship with things.

Care, in this sense, is not sentimental attachment. It’s attentive responsiveness—noticing what something needs and providing it. The good gardener cares for plants by reading their condition and responding appropriately. The good mechanic cares for machines the same way.

Care is learned through practice. You don’t care well for things you don’t understand. Maintenance builds understanding, and understanding enables better care.

This creates a feedback loop. The person who maintains their own tools develops sensitivity to their condition. They notice the loose handle, the forming rust, the blade going dull. They intervene early, when problems are small. The person who never maintains loses this sensitivity. Problems become visible only when they’re large—when the tool fails entirely.

Maintenance as Resistance

In Maintenance and Care: Fixing a Broken World, Shannon Mattern argues that maintenance is political. A culture that celebrates innovation over preservation, creation over care, implicitly devalues the work—often done by women and marginalized people—of keeping things going.

We notice the architect who designs the building. We ignore the janitors who keep it clean, the technicians who maintain its systems, the administrators who ensure it functions. Yet without them, the building is unusable. Design without maintenance is a photograph, not a building.

Mattern suggests that centering maintenance offers “a re-centering of human activity around stewardship and care for the existing stock of materials, rather than perpetual extraction and creation.”

This isn’t nostalgia for a pre-industrial past. It’s a corrective to an imbalance. Innovation matters; so does conservation. Creation matters; so does maintenance. A healthy culture values both.

The Practice of Care

Maintenance is ultimately a practice—something you do regularly, developing skill over time.

The well-maintained life includes:

Tools you care for: Sharpened, cleaned, stored properly
Spaces you tend: Cleaned regularly, repaired promptly, improved incrementally
Objects you steward: Durable goods maintained through their lifespan
Skills you cultivate: The knowledge to diagnose and fix what you own

This requires investment—time, attention, learning. But the investment compounds. The person who maintains their own bicycle understands bicycles better, and that understanding transfers to other mechanical systems. The person who repairs their own clothes understands garment construction, and that understanding improves future purchases.

Pirsig again: “My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that’s all. We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance and old-fashioned gumption.”

Gumption. The willingness to engage, to try, to fix what’s broken. The alternative—learned helplessness in the face of our own possessions—is a diminishment.

Key Texts

Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) — Quality, care, and the classical/romantic divide
Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009) — The cognitive demands and dignity of manual work
Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head (2015) — Attention, agency, and the built environment
Elizabeth Spelman, Repair: The Impulse to Restore in a Broken World (2003) — Philosophical exploration of repair
Mark Thomas Young and Mark Coeckelbergh (eds.), Maintenance and Philosophy of Technology (2023) — Academic collection on maintenance