Overview

Modern life celebrates beginnings. Launches, breakthroughs, reform, innovation. What it rarely acknowledges is what keeps everything going. In The Hidden Life of Maintenance, Elias Nordgren examines the work that sustains the world without attracting attention. Maintenance does not create novelty. It produces continuity. Because it prevents failure rather than causes change, it is systematically overlooked, deferred, and undervalued. This book explains why that neglect is not accidental. Nordgren shows how modern systems reward visible change over invisible upkeep, how maintenance costs are postponed until they reappear as crises, and why increasingly sophisticated systems become more fragile rather than more resilient. He traces how institutions come to rely on emergency response as a substitute for care, how responsibility for continuity dissolves across organizations, and why decline is experienced as constant friction rather than collapse. This is not a book about hard work, pride in labor, or better habits. It is not a management guide or a call to appreciate overlooked roles. It is a structural account of why maintenance is pushed aside even when everyone understands its importance, and what that displacement quietly does to infrastructure, institutions, and everyday life.

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