Back where we started

Here we go round again...

The Kinks recorded the song “Do It Again” in 1984, and it’s fun both to hear and to play: I sang it a few times with one of my cover bands, many years ago. Part of what I like as a performer is that its opening is self-referential:

Standing in the middle of nowhere, wondering how to begin

which makes it an excellent song to start a set.

(There’s a larger topic of songs that make references to themselves, or to songwriting, which I hope to get around to writing one day; “Do It Again” could be included as one of the minor entries there. Other likely items would be “Hook,” “Li’l Tune,” “You’re So Vain,” and “Love Song”)

However, that Kinks song is mostly not about the experience of being the lead singer in a band. Instead, it’s about the way in which daily life – or perhaps more accurately, the daily grind – goes on. The chorus is:

And now we’re back where we started

Here we go round again

Every day I get up and I say

I’d better do it again

(Admittedly, that’s not great rhyming, but it works in the song).

The Jackson Browne song “The Pretender” also includes memorable lines (starting at about 3:17) leading to “do it again”:

I’m gonna find myself a girl

who can show me what laughter means

and we’ll fill in the missing colors

in each other’s paint-by-number dreams

then we’ll put our dark glasses on

and we’ll make love until our strength is gone

and when the morning light comes streaming in

we’ll get up and do it again

I’ve been impressed by the above lines for many years, and even created a piece of typographic art from the text when I was an undergraduate. Browne’s situation sounds quite a bit more attractive than the Kinks version of “doing it again,” except that Browne goes on to ideas that are at least adjacent to what the Kinks are singing about:

I’m gonna be a happy idiot

And struggle for the legal tender […]

And believe in whatever may lie

In those things that money can buy

For true love could have been a contender

We might also consider the Steely Dan song “Do It Again” – a completely different song despite the identical title, which also involves the idea of repetition and cycles. With the Steely Dan song, it’s less about the daily activity and its repetitive quality, more about the choice of activity and a tendency by people to have unchanging habits:

You go back, Jack, do it again

Wheel turning round and round

“Back where we started” and “doing it again” are apt descriptions for a number of situations that I encounter in work or in personal relationships. Something goes wrong, requiring much energy and intelligence to remedy, following which essentially all that has happened is that things are back to where they were before the problem happened.

When things break, for whatever reason, it’s a kind of progress to get things back to where they were. However, it sure doesn’t feel like it when you look at the larger sweep: when you’ve spent hours or days of hard work, and all you can say is that you’re back where you started.

Example: replacing a mobile phone

I had a recent experience of this when purchasing a replacement mobile phone. I had to replace my phone because it was physically broken and old enough that repairing it was not sensible. The replacement required more than two hours in the phone store to get the purchase accomplished and most of the data transferred and configured appropriately. This wasn’t time spent on fussing about features or agonizing over costs and choices: I was only trying to replace the old phone with one that was as much like it as possible, with as little overhead as possible. Even after I was allegedly “done” with that task, there was an additional time in which I repeatedly found something that hadn’t transferred correctly and fixed it by whatever means were available to me. The net result was probably that I spent three or more hours, spread out over two or three days, just to get back where I started.

I know that technically I’m ahead of where I was, because the newer phone is an enhanced version of what I used to have. My experience of the new phone, after fixing all the glitches, is very similar to my experience of the old phone, but of course the phone is improved in terms of various parameters (processor speed, memory, battery life). As a technical person I do understand those various improvements, and some part of me appreciates them, but at the same time I mostly don’t care; certainly, those improvements were not sufficient to compensate for the time I had to spend in getting back to where I started.

Troubleshooting and repairs

When things break at work, and there’s a troubleshooting process followed by various mitigation or repair steps, that’s also a case of people working hard just to get back where we started. That whole situation is worse than my phone replacement, because it’s involuntary. It’s also harder to identify any flavor of improvement alongside the return to “back where we started,” although we do work hard to identify and fix root causes. Perhaps we could say that the gain comes from learning yet another way that the system can fail, another data point in our ongoing effort to improve our reliability.

The experience of “back where we started” can seem even worse in my personal life. If I have an argument or misunderstanding with someone, in the best case the relational repair is pretty easy and simple. Other times, it can feel like a kind of troubleshooting process followed by various attempts to mitigate or fix, just like a work problem. When all is done, at best I’m back where I started.

Perhaps, as with the work situation, the learning along the way is valuable: I learn vulnerabilities to avoid, I improve my awareness of others and myself, I recommit to doing better. At the same time, I’m aware in relationship contexts of a kind of wearing out or wearing down that doesn’t seem to be an element in the work problems.

At work, repeatedly having the same kind of breakdown is a reason for fixing the problematic element or process, and there is a degree of objective evidence for its importance. In interpersonal contexts, one is usually only able to change oneself, and not necessarily in exactly the ways required. Sometimes the problem really does lie with some other party, and the best one can do is to adapt. At other times, the problem may well be mine, but I fall short of recognizing the needed change, or find the needed change to be too hard or too uncomfortable and so continue to cause the problem. Those are situations that can all too often leave me feeling like I’m back where I started.