Prologue

If there's one lesson that Fullmetal Alchemist Lavoisier teaches us, it's that "Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed." Or words to that effect. This means that things will not vanish nor will they be created as if by magic.

In programming, this concept is given the fancy name of 'trade-off', which basically means the same thing: In life, we can't have everything. At least, not at the same time nor out of nowhere. True in Lavoisier’s time, this remains so today. But, holy moly, it's surprising how low our expectations can sometimes be for what we can achieve and deserve in life.

Where I come from, when calling to any technical support, the first thing they will ask you is if you already tried to 'turn it off and on again'. This maneuver is so widely known that people will often lie to the assistant and say they will try to do it once more rather than admit they forgot about it and already wasted a regretful amount of time trying to tackle the problem in a more reasonable way.

I think the shame here is not about how much time you spent with a useless solution, nor how you are trying to tackle the problem in an overcomplicated way. The shame is due to the fact that absolutely everyone expects that the first thing you've tried is to turn the darn thing off, count to 5, and turn it on again. And do you know what the most annoying aspect of it is? It works. This is why it became universal knowledge. It works every single time.

And so, we, as humankind, simply start accepting that things can stop working for no apparent reason. And when this happens, the most reasonable approach to solve it is by turning them off and then on again. "That's just the way things are."

It doesn't matter how much experience we have acquired in life, or how smart or how creative we are. When something stops working unexpectedly, or even worse, when it works but in a really weird and unpredictable way, we sooner rather than later end up just accepting it. At some point, everyone will just give up. And even if one really cares, one will rapidly forget about it: there are things more urgent to occupy us in our modern life.

However, for some of us, the problem is too close to home to simply ignore - as close as the next door, or the elevator, I should say.