Creating a password used to take four seconds. Now it is a negotiation. The website wants at least eight characters, then twelve, then a number, then a symbol, then an uppercase letter, then a lowercase letter, then a note from your doctor confirming you are emotionally prepared for this password.
So you craft one. It has everything. It could stop a tank. And the website says the words that haunt modern life: "You cannot reuse a previous password." Previous? You do not even remember the current one. You have had this account for six years and have reset the password so many times that your password history has more chapters than a fantasy novel.
The password strength meter is its own little tyrant. You type a perfectly reasonable password and the meter glows red and calls it weak, like a disappointed gym teacher. Add an exclamation point and suddenly it is a fortress. Hackers everywhere are presumably devastated by the exclamation point.
Then the account locks you out and demands you prove you are human by identifying every traffic light in a grid of blurry photos. Is that corner of a light part of the light? Nobody knows. Philosophers have debated less. You click the squares, hold your breath, and learn that the robot suspects you are a robot, which feels like profiling.
Two-factor authentication arrives next, sending a code to your phone that expires in the time it takes to switch apps. You memorize six digits like a spy, fumble one, and the whole ritual restarts, because security apparently means never letting the account owner in either.
The punchline is that the password you finally set — the beautiful, compliant, unrepeatable masterpiece — must be changed again in ninety days. You will not remember it. You will click "forgot password" like the rest of us, forever, in a loop designed by someone whose account never locks them out of anything.
Password123 was wrong. This is worse. That sucks.