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It’s insane. Every day, every hour, my precious and irreplaceable time on earth is being used up — siphoned away — setting Usernames and Passwords and Security Questions. Every productive activity I ever want to do online has to be Protected, whether it’s worth protecting or not. If my computer reboots or updates, my bank becomes stand-offish, claiming it “does not recognize” the computer I am using. Against my better judgment, my phone has now gotten involved in these complicated maneuvers, so that I must have it nearby whenever I want to prove that I am who I thought I was when I set up whatever damned account I am trying to access.

In my view, performing these modern-day spells and incantations is a monumental waste of time, and deep down, we all know it. And yet, we gamely cooperate with any new routine we are told is for our Protection. Perhaps we thereby feel faintly and momentarily important. Who doesn’t want to be a spy, or a secret agent, and possess a Secret Spy Decoder Ring? And now, if you have a Password Manager program, you’ve got one. And you do have a Password Manager program, because whenever you complain about all the passwords you have, someone always pipes up and says, “You need a Password Manager program!” Except that even the Password Manager requires time to set up, and does NOT work in all cases, and very soon fills up with folders full of Accounts and Passwords and Identities. It’s a Password Manager, but ultimately, you manage it, which sucks up more hours as you organize all those codes and keys, which you now have to protect with your Master Password, which you then write on a Post-It note and promptly misfile.

The truth is already out there, isn’t it?

What is this Data I am really protecting, with all these codes and keys? Google and Amazon already know my age, my location, my ethnicity, my shoe size, my reading choices, and my future travel plans. Governmental and corporate sites maintain and collect my job history, criminal record, credit history, and other bits and bytes of my life story that leak out into the ether whenever I apply for a position or a document of any kind. The National Security Agency reportedly has records of my phone conversations and my internet use and other features of my life in the 21st century, which it can search and analyze using something called “algorithms,” which for all I know could be animal entrails. (Read this parody site; you will find it quite comparable to the real NSA site.)

I am afraid that protecting so much of my trivial Data makes it start to seem as important as my real Data, which only amounts to a modest bank account or two, a few credit cards, and maybe my medical record. I don’t want those data hacked, but it seems I am jeopardizing their security every time I have to create another login for some other, less important transaction.

Even logging into Medium is more complicated than it should be.

Why do I have to go to my email, or my Facebook, or my LinkedIn accounts? I don’t get it. Isn’t that attenuating my Identity and un-securing my Security? I don’t get it. Can’t they make that process as user-friendly as the rest of the site is? Useless to ask; there is no way to circumvent whatever rain dance or ritual a site wants you to perform. You do it, or you don’t get in. And you just hope the site itself works right with your browser of choice and doesn’t jam up and leave you slack-jawed, watching a tiny spinning icon like a moron.

I don’t know what to do about my “password rage.” I don’t know how long I will be able to remember the answers to ANY of the security questions I select. I don’t know when I will finally just give up on learning the latest tactics for “staying safe” in the virtual world. I don’t know when I will finally break down and decide that none of this is worth it — none of this activity is how I want to spend my time on the planet — and go full Luddite. At that time, I suppose, I will close all my online accounts, order more of those old-school Checks that you use with what is still called your Checking Account, and then I’ll only have to walk down to the mailbox once a day. I recently had a merry conversation with a mattress salesman, in which we agreed that a truly premium mattress would have a nicely made zippered pouch on the bottom, in which you could keep your money, alongside the porn of your choice, when you finally got fed up with online banking.

I’d buy that mattress in a heartbeat. And on that mattress, for Second Factor Authentication, I’d put a large dog.

There. Done.