“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is… fear itself: nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s First Inaugural Address, delivered on 4 March 1933, at the depth of the Great Depression.
On a planet over four billion years old that we occupy, if we’re fortunate, for around four thousand weeks, the gap between Roosevelt’s address and where we are now is little more than a heartbeat.
Yet a heartbeat is all it takes for things to change. Between heartbeats, America has moved from being a source of inspiration to a source of fear. Our relationship with fear, though, has not changed, except perhaps that fear has become an industry in search of eyeballs, operating across boundaries, trading attention for profit. It retains the power to paralyse us, but only if we let it.
Fear thrives in our private disquiet when we think it’s only us and that we are somehow uniquely vulnerable. However, when we gather together and name it in a way that sums up all our individual fears into something we can deal with, fear loses its paralysing power. It doesn’t eliminate the problem, but it changes its nature in a way that makes it something we can address together.
And scary stories, for all their chill, do something quietly humane for us. They give us a way to meet fear without being overwhelmed by it, to rehearse danger, loss and uncertainty within the safety of narrative. They help us give shape to what would otherwise remain formless and troubling about the time we are in. They help us down our individual and collective Kubler-Ross curves, through denial, past anger to negotiating with whatever notions of ourselves are holding us hostage, and on through acceptance to growth. They also bind us, reminding us that we are not alone, that we can be frightened and still belong.
In a culture that prefers us neat, legible and optimised, ghost stories keep alive a more ambiguous, symbolic way of knowing, one that honours who we really are beneath who we are told we should be.
What we need now are not more ghost stories about what might happen, but maintenance stories about what we can actually do. Stories that remind us of capabilities we already possess but have been encouraged to forget, about tending rather than inventing, about the craft of keeping things working rather than the theatre of disruption.
Stewart Brand’s recent book, “The Maintenance of Everything”, offers us such a story. It arrived on my Kindle this week, a delightful and timely reminder that maintenance is an often-ignored discipline. Brand reminds us that it is not invention that keeps systems alive, but the quieter craft of tending, repairing and renewing what already exists. Maintenance is where the reality of our capabilities asserts itself, where abstract plans meet wear, friction and human unpredictability, and where Mētis, not optimisation, does the real work.
Many of the institutions now presenting disruption as an external shock have, for years, quietly neglected their own maintenance work. They have optimised for growth, scale and extraction, whilst the slower disciplines of renewal, skill cultivation, cultural coherence and institutional memory have been allowed to atrophy. The result is not just fragility in the face of geopolitical and technological turbulence, but a kind of internal hollowness. Systems still function, but no longer quite know what they are for or how to adapt without tearing themselves apart.
What we are seeing now is not simply the impact of new forces, but the delayed cost of having treated maintenance as a secondary concern, as many organisations are not being disrupted so much as revealed.
The same could be said of us. For most of the last century, organisations absorbed much of that maintenance labour for us, tending not just machines and buildings but also our skills, trajectories and identities. The reality is that while the absorption was never as complete as we liked to believe, we still went along with it. The idea of belonging to an organisation was always a story, and one that ceased to be believable the moment somebody decided to put the words “human” and “resources” together.
The current moment has changed the stories we are being told, first gradually, now suddenly, and there is no longer any pretence that organisations offer us security or career paths. We are being told very clearly that might is right and that we have a choice: accept what we’re given or find our own way. It can feel like betrayal, but it isn’t. It’s simply the end of a particular fiction we chose to believe.
That doesn’t stop it from being unsettling.
This is where maintenance becomes more than metaphor. To maintain our career today is not to polish a CV, but to steward a practice, a reputation, a web of relationships and a capacity to learn and unlearn over time. In a culture fixated on speed, scale and reinvention, this quieter discipline of self-maintenance becomes a form of resistance, a way of refusing to be treated as disposable.
In his book, Brand refers to some of my favourite authors on craft, from Richard Sennett and Robert Pirsig to Matthew Crawford, whose observation captures something essential about maintenance work:
“The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on.”
The things we do that matter are supported by technology, but cannot be done by it, and it is easy for us to forget and neglect the skills we have that fill the vital spaces between what technology can do. Every time we use an app for convenience, a little bit of our own skill and connection to our work erodes, and we start to hollow out, and lose the memory of capability. This is not an argument against technology, but a reminder that technology works best when it enhances rather than replaces our own embodied knowledge.
The danger is that when we listen to others’ stories rather than tell our own, we lose sight of who we are. Particularly when there are those whose credibility and fortunes rely on our gullibility. As Brand observes, “Old systems fail in familiar and prepared-for ways. New systems fail in unexpected and unprepared-for ways.” The stories we are being told about transformation and disruption will not unfold as they are presented. Those whose hubris convinces them they are in charge of what’s happening will find themselves surprised.
As that happens, we need to be in the best shape we can be in, physically and mentally, to do the work we choose to do. Maintenance requires us to be honest about our current condition; not the version we present on LinkedIn or in performance reviews, but the actual state of our capabilities, our relationships, and knowledge. This is the work of acceptance that follows denial and anger. It is where we stop negotiating with the fictions that have been holding us hostage and start tending to what we actually have, and creating what we want.
The problems that emerge will not be solved by technology alone, but rather by people with skill and knowledge working together effectively. It will be a function of improvisation by people who care about what they’re doing more than the money they’re being paid. People who have maintained their capacity to respond to what’s actually in front of them rather than what the plan said would be there.
This is what artisans have always done. They maintain their tools, their workshops, and their materials. They maintain their skills through practice, their knowledge through attention, and their craft through teaching. They know that mastery is not a destination but a discipline of continuous tending, that the work is never finished, that there is always more to learn, and that there will always be something that needs repair or renewal.
Roosevelt spoke of converting retreat into advance. That conversion is not a single moment of decision but a sustained practice of maintenance. It begins with naming our fear collectively rather than enduring it privately. It continues with tending to the capabilities we have rather than abandoning them for the promise of something new. It requires us to recognise that we are not starting from nothing, but from an archaeology of capability that we have been encouraged to bury.
The maintenance of everything includes the maintenance of ourselves. Not as resources to be optimised, but as craftspeople with knowledge, skill and the capacity to work alongside others who are doing the same.
Whatever we end up calling them, we’ll recognise them as artisans.
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Wednesday Zoom Call
For those of you that can, Zoom will be open this evening at 5 pm UK time. If you haven’t come on the call before, you’re more than welcome. No preparation is needed.
