Why turning it off and on again works so well
A little insight into the human condition
You’d be forgiven for thinking we’re living in the future. AI can pull sophisticated text and images from nothingness; our phones are (technically) more powerful than spaceships; and an array of apps exist that can deliver us Pringles at any hour of the day.
But — just when you truly begin to believe we’re in a whole new world — something goes wrong. Your computer freezes. Your phone slows down. Your tablet stutters. And how, may I ask, in this cursed year of 2023, do you fix it?
By turning it off and on again.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
So here’s what happened. In the past few weeks I got bang into the Nintendo Switch again. I play mainly in handheld mode, but, for a change, I docked my console to use the big screen.
But there was a problem: it only showed at 480p on the TV.
I tried everything I could think of to fix it. I used different cables. I restarted and removed my HDMI splitter. I changed to a different Switch dock. I dove into settings on the television and console. I browsed Reddit for answers. But nothing worked. Nothing.
Well, until I turned my TV off and on again.
A complete power down solved the issue immediately, the Switch displaying its highest resolution on my external screen.
I’ll be honest: the beginning of this piece was slightly disingenuous. Just because we’re living in the future doesn’t mean our unbelievably advanced tech is flawless.
Fundamentally, machines are still made by humans, after all.
The reason restarting devices and software generally works, is because it takes them back to their default state. Over time, a multitude of elements can cause performance issues — such as memory leaking, software bugs, or simple processing errors — and turning them off and on again returns them to a known starting position.
There’s an excellent Reddit comment explaining this using the analogy of sorting letters.
On one hand, this is irritating: a human failure transplanted to computers.
But, the more I pondered it, the more I took a strange type of solace in having to restart my devices when they mess up.
This, I believe, is universal.
Just think of the endless scenes in The IT Crowd, where Roy’s immediate response to a colleague’s tech issue is to “turn it off and on again.” This joke only works because the experience is so universal, something entrenched in our lives.
It’s comforting to think that our devices are infallible, that these magical things aren’t perfect. They’re flawed — like us.
Turning devices off and on again is stuck in our collective consciousness because the idea itself is so alluring. All of us long for a clean slate, the idea that each day, week, or year, we could simply reset ourselves back to a version that’s simpler, less messed up; a person that just, well, works.
And you know what? Long may restarting solve our woes. A world where we don’t have to turn our gadgets off and on to fix them doesn’t sound very relatable at all.