It’s the time of year to ponder self-improving resolutions, and I find myself consulting one of my favourite 87-year-olds: the visionary author Stewart Brand. But if Brand is right, perhaps self-improvement isn’t quite the right term; self-maintenance might be better.

“You can imagine I have a lot of experience and thoughts concerning self-maintenance these days,” Brand tells me. His new book is Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One. If he survives long enough to add a second part, he plans to include a photo “of all the teeth (natural and implants) that have fallen or been yanked out of my head over the years . . . I kept them all as incentive to keep up with my dental hygiene. It didn’t work.”

Maintenance is not a romantic subject. It can seem like an endless set of repetitive chores in which the best possible result is that you’re back where you started. We can be forgiven for wanting to cut some corners. Brand’s proposed caption for the photo of his double handful of lost teeth: “I brushed when I felt like it.”