Last week I fixed two things in our house:

  1. A drawer that wouldn’t open and shut smoothly
  2. A gate latch that tended to catch and get stuck

Each repair took less than twenty minutes, including cleanup and putting my tools away.

Both problems had been bothering me every single day, for months on end. Now, I revel in the smooth action every time I open or close the drawer, or latch or unlatch the gate.

Why did it take me so long to complete both repairs?

The Inertia of Minor Suffering

I think there is a common psychological tendency to accept minor suffering and just soldier on. After all, isn’t that required in life? We all have problems, and not all of those problems can be solved with the snap of a finger. So to some extent we need to develop the capacity to accept some degree of inconvenience, irritation, or even suffering, and carry on with our lives.

Stoicism (in the conventional sense of the word, not the philosophy) is a helpful character trait. But the tendency to ignore problems that can be fixed is not. Here’s why making small repairs (to home, body, and even personality/mind/spirit) is important:

  • The direct irritation or suffering caused by the thing that needed fixing goes away, thus reducing mental load and freeing up energy and willpower.
  • Our self worth goes up because we’ve just applied higher standards to our own life.
  • The minor success of a small repair builds our appetite and motivation for taking on more challenging problems in our own lives, and even in our community and society.

That’s it for today, just that one idea. But I’m frequently impressed by how much of a psychological difference small fixes can make.

New Music Release

In unrelated news, Spesh and I have a new release titled Refractions (Spotify link). It’s a retrospective collection of some of our favorite tracks, some of which we produced over twenty years ago, some much more recently. We’re not calling it “greatest hits” because none of them were hits (except for “We Are Connected”, briefly, when John Digweed put it on one of his more famous mixes). If you’re into the deeper varieties of dance music check it out and let me know what you think!