Serious maintenance

If I smoked, I'd light up a cigarette and take a walk to reflect. But I don’t, and I only give myself two slots a year to take a longer spin around the block and exhale my thoughts. This time, I want to do it properly. 

Before, my yearly reflections read like corporate performance reviews. I approached them with a problem-solver attitude, focusing on sequences of events rather than actions, analyzing before initiating, and relying on theories rather than personal experiences. Rules over hunches. 

I conducted my investigations in all the wrong places. I structured my reflections as recounts of achievements and failures, with some generic boilerplate pledges to “do better”. I was coming from a good place, but I was like the proverbial drunk under a streetlight – only searching where it is the easiest to look.

What would my semi-annual reflection routine look like if I focused on action instead of theory? To find out, I'm changing my approach in this mid-year review. 

In part, my goal is to write something that is actually interesting to read and pleasant to write. But I am also curious to explore the power of narratives to smoothen the edges of my internal dialogue — from fractals to polygons. 

To build a cohesive narrative and analyze the past six months I have to pick a larger gestalt to connect different experiences. One of my favorite books, Matthew Crawford’s "Shop Class as Soulcraft” anchors its modern philosophical musing in the melodrama of motorcycle maintenance. I thought I’d borrow that.

As someone who has never ridden motorcycles, I am appropriating this framing almost illegitimately. But the notion of maintenance is so profoundly seductive, and I relate to it deeply. Why? Because maintenance – as Crawford has it – demands a level of seriousness that extends beyond motorcycle usage. Surprisingly, it’s quite the existential posture.

Take motorcycle repair. It is thankless, unsexy, frustrating, and – importantly — solitary. It requires a calm mind and an unshakeable dedication. It forces you to appreciate the compounding benefits of habits and systems, rather than on-demand heroics. If the joy of the ride is the “hummock”, maintenance is the “bummock”. 

It’s a popular trope that life is hard, but it shouldn’t be – or at least, almost always itcould be easier. Coping with loss, making ends meet, and raising kids sure are tough. But many frequent, seemingly hard situations are just downstream of a healthy body, an unbothered mind, and an ego kept in check.

The corollary of “life is hard” is that – to survive and thrive – you want to push back vigorously, in that moment. Instead, I aspire to remove obstacles from the pathway and lubricate cogs, every day. I want to systematically reduce friction, instead of occasionally redlining and overextending myself. Marathons over sprints. 

But sometimes, my own practice of maintenance gets me stuck into what Crawford calls  “gumption traps”. Certain situations “destroy enthusiasm”, and “leave you so discouraged you want to forget the whole business”. These are gumption traps. They are the natural enemy of the flow state. There are three types of gumption traps I have been able to overcome in the first half of this year: intermittent failure, anxiety, and value rigidity. 

An all-too-common gumption killer is the maddening Intermittent Failure. The enthusiasm of a flow state while working shorts out at times. You get stuck. You pick it back up, but then it’s shorting out again, and you realize that the problem will disappear entirely only if a drastic intervention is operated – a change of approach, a major correction, a serious fix. Despair ensues.  

Writing has always been a source of intermitted failure for me. I am a little embarrassed to admit that I write at least partly because it’s hard. But the shape of my thoughts on a Google Doc is the best barometer of mental clarity I have. 

In the past, I mentioned in this newsletter I wanted to “let myself go of the obligation to write often” – a statement that dragged me into a swamp of self-awarded free passes. I stopped publishing.

I am proud to have been devoting regularly more time to writing, even exceeding my set publishing cadence. I have also matured more refined ideas on the direction of this newsletter and will publish more content that aligns directly with my intellectual interests. More to come on this. 

Now, when intermittence occurs while writing, I try to correlate it with contextual elements. Do I know enough about this subject? Do I lack knowledge, structure, or both? Am I overcomplicating because I don’t know enough? These correlations are clues for cause-and-effect hypotheses. I learned how to “science my way out” of the trap. 

But where I can’t always science my way out is…well when I deal with actual science. Over the past few years, I shifted my career focus to hard science problems. From co-founding a liquid biopsy venture to commercializing quantum computation solutions in drug discovery. 

Because of my mostly self-taught scientific background, I feel I am to physics and biochemistry what Olive Garden is to Italian cuisine. This often made me anxious. In a state of agitation, I fix things that don’t need fixing and chase after imaginary ailments. I jump to wild conclusions because of nervousness. 

To break the cycle, I learned to read everything I can find relevant about the subject. And when I am done, I cold contact experts with specific questions – to which they respond more often than not.

Knowing more is both soothing and helpful. As I keep adjusting my approach, relevant ideas bubble up to the surface, and my confidence grows. Slowly chipping away at scientific topics invigorates me with a sense of pride that is only heartfelt because it’s hard-earned.

Another hang-up I defeated recently is Value Rigidity, the inability to reevaluate what one sees because of commitment to previous values – a type of sunk cost fallacy. Part of a pragmatic diagnosis of a problem is the ability to be realistic about when to abandon repair and maintenance and buy a new motorcycle, or even give up riding. 

With my rejuvenated focus on system maintenance, I here absolve myself for the sins of “productivity for its own sake”: I declare bankruptcy of my Notion “second brain”, a concoction of notes, plans, and documents I frankensteined together for the best part of the last three years, and that has absorbed more than it has produced.

This DIY dashboard was meant to “put my life in order”, and streamline my decision-making by interlinking notes and offloading cognitive weight. Needless to say, all I ever needed was a spreadsheet and my calendar, but I was hung up on the vision to build a Zettlekasten of my mind as if I needed one to think clearly. 

This recalibration on general maintenance rather than firefighting may sound like a rather passive strategy, something only loosely or indirectly connected to a specific obstacle. But in practice, it means following through past all sorts of obstacles. You usually have to assume a contrarian social posture and bear the risk of social rejection. So maintenance does take an appreciable degree of boldness.

That’s because being good at maintenance requires seriousness – a kind of maniacal belief that you are doing the right or necessary thing and hence you can’t be stopped nor distracted, by anything or anyone. 

Seriousness as a form of unwavering sacrifice and solemnity has lost appeal in the West, and perhaps in some of my behaviors too — like when I procrastinate dull work tasks or skip workouts to sleep in.

Seriousness is often criticized and shamed as if the mere existence of strivers poses a threat to slackers. You can see it everywhere: memes replace conversations, and social media encourage performance over permanence. Snark is the code of my (and likely your) generation. 

As David Foster Wallace puts it, “sarcasm, parody, absurdism, and irony [...] become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication”. There is an essay somewhere on irony being the song of a bird that has come to love its cage.

But in this culture of detachment, I want seriousness to become my form of boundary, and maintenance its practical expression. It's the wish I make for myself as I enter the second half of this year.

It means carving out dedicated time for deep work and reflection, being intentional about how I spend my time and energy, and ensuring alignment between general and particular. 

To be clear, serious maintenance is not about productivity. It’s about embracing responsibilities as a form of true freedom. Most would think of freedom as the absence of restraint. But, as the theologian Tim Keller puts it, real freedom “is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones.”

So much of our lives are determined by the cultural definition of freedom (“freedom from”) we carry around unconsciously in our heads. That’s freedom from. But there is another and higher kind of freedom: freedom to.

This is freedom as the fullness of capacity, and it often involves restriction and restraint. The positive idea that emerges is that freedom amounts to radical self-responsibility. As David Brooks puts it, the things you chain yourself to — and maintain — set you free.