Rosaline Dou




Reactive, Pseudo, Sub-Maintenance


I often procrastinate until my home becomes unbearable, then spend hours deep-cleaning. The dramatic “before and after” effect makes this burst of effort feel satisfying. I call this reactive maintenance: repair all at once when it becomes urgent. But this isn’t maintenance—it’s emergency response. Reactive maintenance appears productive because it leads to visible results and an immediate sense of accomplishment. Consistent maintenance, by contrast, offers no such reward. Its effects accumulate through small, preventive acts repeated day after day. The impulse to delay maintenance follows the logic of credit cards: spend now, pay later. We are trained to “pay” (attention) to meeting the deadline, not to care continuously. Maintenance becomes something we owe, not something we do. Why do we avoid maintenance? Why does it so often begin only when it becomes impossible to ignore?

Our culture prioritizes efficiency and output, offering little incentive for consistent maintenance. Maintenance does not translate easily into the sanctioned currencies of productivity: time, money, and selfhood. Because it doesn’t register as valuable within these terms, I internalize this logic, growing increasingly reluctant to spend those very currencies on assets as basic as maintenance. The market thrives on this neglect, selling quick fixes, productivity hacks, and energy drinks that treat symptoms rather than causes. Over time, this shortcut economy seeps into our habits. Consistent maintenance becomes too “expensive” for a system that fails to recognize its worth while profiting from burnout and repair. 

Energy, unlike time or money, is not seen as a legitimate currency. We rarely account for its loss until complete depletion. Reactive maintenance seems efficient, yet draining as a deferred price. Each delay compounds the cost, whether through extra time and energy for delayed fixes compared to daily care, or through the burnout following a sudden burst of effort. The debt accumulates. Reactive maintenance is de facto pseudo-maintenance: labor that looks productive but sustains systems that exhaust us. We are trapped in a vicious cycle, where maintenance, meant to restore, ends up depleting further. The more we strive to upkeep through exhaustion, the more maintenance itself begins to feel ineffective, inefficient, even futile.

The delay of maintenance leaves us in chronic sub-maintenance, just functional enough to postpone collapse. Each day, I seek to optimize my performance despite being physically and mentally under-resourced. I convince myself that my mind is sharp enough to override a tired body. But how can that be? Paradoxically, much of life is maintenance. Eating, sleeping, socializing, and working are each a form of upkeep for status, identity, or function. Yet few of these feel restorative. If we are constantly maintaining, or under-maintained, when do we ever get to upgrade? You cannot upgrade what is barely maintained. What we call “upgrades” are often just repairs in disguise, like bug fixes labeled as updates in mobile apps.

What do we lack to sustain consistent maintenance? It’s not about endurance or enforcing rigid routines, which I have never managed to persist in. Energy is an undervalued currency: we realize its value but seldom internalize it into our logic of worth. Instead, we spend what we cannot afford, only to repay it later with the debt of chronic exhaustion.