There is a particular kind of spirituality unique to modern technology.
Not religion exactly.
More ritualised troubleshooting.
You encounter a problem.
A device refuses to sync.
A Focus mode disappears into another dimension.
AirPods suddenly decide they belong to a passing lawnmower.
Your printer develops a philosophical objection to cyan.
And so begins the liturgy.
Restart the device.
Toggle the setting off and on again.
Sign out of iCloud.
Wait a few moments.
Believe.
The strange thing is that this often works.
Not in a satisfying engineering sense.
More in the way ancient rain dances occasionally worked.
You perform the ritual.
The machine observes your humility.
Reality stabilises.
And then — worst of all — the problem disappears so completely that the system behaves as though it had never failed in the first place.
“This has been working correctly the whole time.”
“You were holding it wrong.”
“The synchronization completed successfully.”
Which creates the uniquely modern psychological experience of being softly gaslit by a rectangle made of aluminium and optimism.
The truly annoying part is that Apple’s systems are often elegant enough that we continue participating willingly.
Because most of the time the ecosystem does feel magical.
Photos appear everywhere.
Messages arrive seamlessly.
AirPods leap invisibly between devices.
Your watch unlocks your laptop like some tiny domestic wizard.
And your phone changes its personality depending on where you are and who you’re with.
And so when something breaks, we instinctively assume the problem must be timing, ritual purity, or insufficient faith.
Not system failure.
Because surely the beautiful machine would not betray us.
At one point during all this I even submitted an actual feature request to Apple asking for unread badge counts to vary by Focus mode.
Which is perhaps the purest expression of modern technological citizenship imaginable.
Not repairing the machine.
Not understanding the machine.
Just politely requesting that the machine become slightly more emotionally considerate.
Anyway.
The reboot fixed it.