06/11/2025
Doing nothing seems cheap. It should be easy, even relaxing. Like some Corona commercial where you sit around with Snoop all day, watching waves crash while sipping lukewarm beer.
And for a while, it is easy. Inaction today feels like a bargain. But time doesn’t care about your short-term savings. Clocks are relentless, and the invoice for doing nothing always shows up, just with interest.
Maintenance never goes away. We can postpone it, rename it, pretend we’re “monitoring the situation,” but nature doesn’t care what euphemism we slap on it. Entropy is always at work. Every day we delay, the cost goes up and the job gets harder. That’s as true for bodies and relationships as it is for buildings and cities.
Stagnation isn’t the status quo, it’s decline in disguise.
The real problem with neglect is that it creates the illusion of stability. But when we stop maintaining something, be it our health, our downtown, or our civic standards, it doesn’t just stay frozen in time. Nature goes to work. Moisture seeps in. Paint peels. Bugs nest. People stop caring. And the longer we ignore it, the more it weighs on us. Not just physically, but mentally. Neglect creates stress. Delay turns into dread.
And unlike your Roomba, civic maintenance can’t be automated. It doesn’t run while you scroll Instagram. We all know when something needs attention, we just hope someone else will deal with it first.
This applies to our homes, our health, our neighborhoods. But I see it most clearly in our cities. The built environment is one of the biggest influences on public health, yet it’s largely ignored. The space between houses is still our home. Downtown is our home. And when those places fall into disrepair, we all feel it. Not just aesthetically, but emotionally, economically, psychologically.
A single neglected building can ripple through a town. Maybe not for the deadbeat owner, but for every neighboring property, for city budgets, tourism, business recruitment, civic pride. Every cracked window, every sagging awning, every weed-filled lot is a stressor, one more reminder that things are sliding and no one’s doing anything about it.
And here’s the kicker: we all behave differently depending on our surroundings. I recently walked into an elegant hotel bar in Toronto and instantly felt more sophisticated. Not because I changed clothes or adopted a British accent, because the space told guests to elevate ourselves. That’s how powerful place is.
Neglect sends the opposite message. It tells us to expect less, care less, and try less. And that’s exactly what we do.
So no, neglect isn’t cheap. It’s just delayed maintenance with interest. It’s more expensive, more stressful, and ultimately more damaging than just doing the damn work when it’s needed. If cities calculated the real cost of inaction, code enforcement would be their most profitable department.
Because the cost of neglect is exponential. The longer we wait, the higher the bill. And the whole town ends up footing it.
