  First passage under restart has recently emerged as a conceptual framework
suitable for the description of a wide range of phenomena, but the endless
variety of ways in which restart mechanisms and first passage processes mix and
match hindered the identification of unifying principles and general truths.
Hope that these exist came from a recently discovered universality displayed by
processes under optimal, constant rate, restart---but extensions and
generalizations proved challenging as they marry arbitrarily complex processes
and restart mechanisms. To address this challenge, we develop a generic
approach to first passage under restart. Key features of diffusion under
restart---the ultimate poster boy for this wide and diverse class of
problems---are then shown to be completely universal.
