according to ben gibbard, this is what the song means to him: "I wanted to create this character that's going through the motions, not really sure of why they're necessarily doing it because it's just the thing that they have to do at this point and it's expected that they're going to be doing this. It's not necessarily a story [about] any particular person in my life; it's as much an amalgam of a lot of different elements of how we move forward with our lives and what's expected of us and how we transition into those places."
according to ben gibbard, this is what the song means to him: "I wanted to create this character that's going through the motions, not really sure of why they're necessarily doing it because it's just the thing that they have to do at this point and it's expected that they're going to be doing this. It's not necessarily a story [about] any particular person in my life; it's as much an amalgam of a lot of different elements of how we move forward with our lives and what's expected of us and how we transition into those places."