The War of Attrition

My thumb is numb, pressing against a glass screen that refuses to acknowledge my existence because of a thin layer of Kentucky clay and a light drizzle that’s turning the cemetery path into a slip-and-slide. I’m standing over plot 42, trying to pull up the digital map of the north quadrant, but the banking app on my laptop-which is currently sitting in the dry cab of my truck 122 yards away-demands a six-digit code. The code is here, on the phone in my freezing hand, but the laptop is the one that needs it. I am the bridge. I am the meat-circuitry required to satisfy a security protocol that assumes I am a thief until I prove, for the 32nd time today, that I am indeed Sage A.J., the man currently losing a fight with a dead man’s drainage system.

It’s a war of attrition. That’s the only way to describe the current state of Two-Factor Authentication. It isn’t a wall; it’s a tax. It’s a slow, rhythmic erosion of human patience designed by people who live in climate-controlled offices and never have to log into a server while wearing mud-caked boots. I just lost an argument with the grounds committee about the orientation of the new memorial bench in section 2. I was right-the sun hits the bronze at an angle that will blind anyone sitting there by 4:02 PM-but they didn’t care about the physics. They cared about the permit. Security is the same way. It doesn’t care if you’re the rightful owner of the data; it only cares if you’ve jumped through the specific hoops in the specific order, even if the hoops are currently on fire.

Protection as Prison

This constant friction is sold to us as a necessity, a ‘layer of protection’ in a dangerous digital landscape. And sure, the world is full of ghosts looking to haunt your checking account. But there is a point where the protection becomes a prison. When I have to walk 122 yards back to my truck because my session timed out in the 52 seconds it took me to wipe the mud off my screen, the system isn’t protecting me from hackers; it’s protecting the company from the liability of my existence. It’s a transfer of labor. The security team at the bank gets to sleep better because they’ve forced the ‘weakest link’-me-to do the heavy lifting of verification.

Security is the only industry where the customer is treated as the primary threat to the product’s integrity.

I remember when tools used to just… work. You picked up a shovel, and it moved dirt. You didn’t have to show the shovel a QR code from your rake to prove you were authorized to dig. But we’ve moved into an era of ‘security theater’ where the complexity of the login process is treated as a proxy for the robustness of the encryption. It’s a lie, of course. Most of these 2FA implementations are clunky, tacked-on afterthoughts that create massive single points of failure. If my phone battery dies, my entire digital life becomes a tomb. I’m effectively buried alive in a coffin of my own credentials.

Structural Lack of Empathy

It’s a lack of empathy on a structural level. The developers who build these systems assume your life is a series of seated moments in front of a high-speed fiber connection. They don’t account for the groundskeeper, the nurse with gloved hands, or the parent holding a screaming toddler. They treat the user as a managed asset, not a person with a finite amount of cognitive energy.

There’s a certain irony in my profession. In the cemetery, once you’re in, you’re in. There are no secondary checks for the residents of section 2. But for the living, the gates are getting narrower and the locks more convoluted. We are being trained to accept that access is a privilege to be negotiated, rather than a right of ownership. We don’t own our digital spaces; we rent them at the cost of our constant attention.

It’s why I’ve started looking for tools that don’t demand this kind of subservience. I’ve found that the best experiences are the ones that recognize the value of my time. For instance, when I need to handle quick tasks without the overhead of a thousand security checks, I use

YT1D, because it doesn’t treat me like a suspicious character trying to break into my own life. It just does the job.

The Physical vs. The Ethereal

I told them the drainage pipe was clogged 82 days ago. They ignored me because the paperwork said the pipe was clear. Now, plot 42 is a marsh, and I’m the one who has to stand in it, fumbling with a phone that wants to know if I’m really me.

We’ve traded the risk of a stolen key for the certainty of a stolen hour. Every. Single. Day.

If you add up all the seven-second delays spent waiting for a text message or an app to generate a code, you’d find a significant portion of our lives being interred in the digital soil. Over a lifetime, that’s 1002 hours of staring at a loading spinning wheel, proving we exist to a server that doesn’t care.

The Return to Utility

I finally got the code to work. I entered the digits-4, 2, 8, 1, 9, 2-and the banking app opened just as a raindrop hit the ‘Log Out’ button. The irony wasn’t lost on me. The system worked perfectly. It protected me from seeing my own balance. It kept the data safe by keeping it away from me. I shoved the phone back into my pocket and picked up my shovel. The shovel didn’t ask for a fingerprint. It didn’t send a push notification to my watch. It just hit the earth with a satisfying thud, moving the clay exactly where I wanted it to go.

We are losing the argument for a human-centric digital world, much like I lost the argument about the bench. We are being told that the permit matters more than the light, and the protocol matters more than the person. But as I stand here in the quiet of the afternoon, watching the gray clouds move over the headstones, I realize that these systems of friction will eventually crumble under their own weight. We will migrate to the tools that respect us, the ones that don’t make us dance for the right to see our own work.

The Inevitable Migration

Until then, I’ll keep my shovel sharp and my truck keys close, because at least in the physical world, when I turn a lock, I know exactly who is in charge.