Did you try unplugging it and plugging it back in?
I can read you this post:
My very first job in tech was perhaps at the lowest ring of the latter in our industry. That being tech support. Even worse, level 1 telephone tech support. I’m so old that we used to do that job solely in America and not some far-flung country. The year was 1999, so as you can imagine, people’s general tech competency was pretty damn low. I still have flashbacks of helping sweet grandmas go into their Windows registry and change many advanced parameters. Once you do that a few times, you essentially have infinite patience for any tech problem you might encounter. Oh, and if you manage to fix their problem, the grandmas think of you as some type of savant. They would ask if they could send us cookies. Talk about sweet.
When the issue was not so advanced, there was one common solution to most technical challenges. That of course is to ask the customer if they could “turn it off and on again”. Yup, the ol’ restart trick. We didn’t spit that out because we were lazy it just genuinely worked like 8 out of 10 times. Systems get knocked out of wack or clogged up with whatever and a restart typically would clear that right up. I guess that solution stuck with me more than I knew because I would later apply that not just to computers but to many other things in my life, especially when I felt stuck. Unfortunately, now that I have restarted so many times I forgot what the original problem was. Doh!
I’m thinking and rambling about this topic now as I feel like many people are amid their own restart. Just look how many people in our industry are now experts on Web3, something that doesn't exist. Whether you live on the blockchain or off it the pandemic gave us all new perspectives and frameworks for how to live and what we want from that life. Truthfully you’d be a fool not to take some advantage of this time to approach things from a slightly different angle. For those who need a bit more change don’t be afraid to give yourself that ol’ reboot, to purge your RAM and enjoy the reallocation of precious resources. Stop hitting snooze on the auto-update notifications of life and let the damn thing restart already. I know it’s a bit scary to do so sometimes but coming from someone who has restarted many things many times, I can tell you it’s only painful at first. You’ll actually feel a massive relief once you take those first new steps. Like immediately after you do so. Sure it might cost you a lot of money or personal relationships as it has for me, but still, I don’t have too many regrets and hope you don't either.
This time around I’m restarting alone and newly single for the first time in over a decade. My last relationship was my everything and probably the only reason I made it through *makes sweeping hand motion* whatever the hell the last two years were. Although I guess given where I stand now I didn’t quite make it. Why not? Well, the funny answer is that she got her covid misinformation from TikTok, and I got mine from YouTube. So in some sense, we just started to speak different languages. The real answer is, of course, harder to explain and will take more time to process. These types of restarts are often the hardest to make as they come also with so much self-doubt and uncertainty. This might be a good time to think like a politician “Never let a good crisis go to waste”. This reboot was a tough one, a real ‘cold restart’. So I do plan to at least get the most from it.
Lastly, let’s not forget that nowadays, all the rules of life, work, and love have become very bendy. Yes, very malleable and squishy and other great words that make you think of smooshing things. That alone should make it a bit easier to flip the switch and do something entirely new. I mean do whatever the hell you want, but please stop doing those things you no longer enjoy.
