Care is often repetitive precisely because deterioration is repetitive too.

Deterioration is not a single event, it is a continuous process, and anything that opposes it has to be continuous too. That is why care is repetitive and why the repetition feels thankless. It is not that your previous effort failed. It is that the thing you are working against never stopped either.

Stop expecting maintenance to reach a finished state. Set the rhythm you can sustain and repeat it. The repetition is not evidence of failure, it is the shape of the work.