The click is too loud in the 2 a.m. silence of the galley. I am staring at a grid of 12 squares, trying to decide if the faint orange blur in the corner of one counts as a 'traffic light.' My eyes are burning from the low-grade hum of the fluorescent lights, the kind that never truly turn off when you are submerged 212 meters below the Atlantic. It is a ridiculous way to spend a break. I just wanted to check my personal messages before the 42-minute bread cycle started. Instead, I am engaged in a digital interrogation, a silent battle with an algorithm that is increasingly convinced I am a script written by a bored teenager in some basement on the surface.
It is the same frustration I felt three days ago when I argued with the Communications Officer about the firewall settings. I told him that making the login process this difficult would lead to 'verification exhaustion,' and he just laughed, citing some manual written by someone who has never had to troubleshoot a server while breathing recycled air. He was wrong, of course. He is usually wrong, yet he has the rank, so I am the one clicking on crosswalks in the middle of the ocean.
The Theater of Self-Flagellation
We have entered an era where cybersecurity has ceased to be about protection and has become a ritual of self-flagellation. We call it security, but it is actually a trust deficit problem. We have built digital landscapes so jagged and unwelcoming that they treat legitimate users with more hostility than actual intruders. It is a theater. We jump through hoops to prove we are not bots, while the bots are currently busy writing perfect, grammatically flawless phishing emails that bypass every filter we have.
I spent 82 seconds considering if I should reply before I realized our CFO doesn't even know my middle name is Aloysius.
[The digital world is a locked door that asks for your blood but settles for your attention.]
Taught to Be Machine
This is the irony that keeps me awake in my bunk. We are being trained to behave like machines to satisfy other machines. We are taught to be precise, to be fast, to never hesitate, and to recognize patterns in grainy 2002-era photographs. If we act too 'human'-if we take too long to find the bicycle, if we mis-click because our fingers are tired, if we forget a password we haven't used in 12 weeks-we are locked out. We are punished for the very traits that define us. Meanwhile, the actual threats are using the same AI we are training to mimic our behavior perfectly.
The Cognitive Load Exchange
Human Error (Punished)
Bot Mimicry (Rewarded)
Every time you click a square to help an algorithm recognize a fire hydrant, you are essentially teaching a future autonomous vehicle how to navigate a city, but you are also teaching a bot how to pass as you. It is a 2-way street where we are paying the toll in cognitive load.
This constant state of low-grade paranoia is degrading our ability to spot real danger. When every interaction with a website feels like a battle, our focus is fractured. We are so relieved to finally get past the CAPTCHA and the 2-factor authentication code-which usually arrives 32 seconds too late-that we lose our critical edge. We are exhausted. And in that exhaustion, we click the link in the email that says our account has been compromised.
Seeking Honest Exchange
I remember land life, where you could walk into a store and buy a loaf of bread without having to prove you weren't a hologram. There was a baseline of trust. You gave them currency; they gave you flour. In the digital space, that trust is gone. You are a threat until proven otherwise, and even then, the proof only lasts for a 22-minute session.
There is a specific kind of madness in the way we handle digital identity. We have 102 different passwords, 12 different authenticator apps, and a growing sense of alienation. I once spent 72 minutes trying to recover an account for a service I didn't even want anymore, simply because the system wouldn't let me delete it without 'verifying' my identity first. It felt like being trapped in a Kafkaesque loop where the gatekeeper is a line of code that doesn't understand the concept of 'I don't care anymore.'
Optimization Failure: Forgetting the Center
Because a bot might try to log in 1002 times in a second, the human who tries to log in once but forgets their mother's maiden name is treated with the same suspicion. We have optimized for the edge case and forgotten the center. We have built a world for the 2 percent of bad actors and forced the 92 percent of honest people to live in a digital prison.
[We are the ghosts in our own machines, rattling the chains of our passwords.]
Safety vs. Functionality
We are losing hours of our lives to these digital checkpoints. If you add up all the seconds spent looking for boats and chimneys, we have likely collectively lost 522 years of human potential this month alone. That is a lot of bread that could have been baked, or books that could have been read, or conversations that could have been had without a screen between us.
It is a lonely feeling, especially when you are already 222 miles away from the nearest coastline.
The Honesty of the Oven
There has to be a better way to navigate this. A way that recognizes that trust is a two-way street. If a company wants my business, they should start by trusting that I am who I say I am, at least until I give them a reason not to. They should focus on detecting the behavior of the thief, rather than testing the patience of the customer.
The Bread Is Honest
The yeast doesn't ask for crosswalks. The oven is predictable.
Until then, I will stay here in my galley, watching the dough rise in its 12-count tins, knowing that at least the yeast doesn't ask me to find the squares with the mountains before it decides to do its job. The deep sea is dangerous, but it doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is. I wish I could say the same for my login screen.
I will finish this bread, and then I will try one more time to log in. Maybe this time, the traffic lights will be clear. Maybe this time, I will click with just the right amount of 'human' uncertainty. Or maybe I will just sit here and enjoy the silence, 2 minutes of peace before the next alarm goes off and the cycle begins again. We are all just trying to get through the gate. It would be nice if the gatekeeper remembered that he was built to serve us, not the other way around. But for now, I am just a man in a metal tube, squinting at pixels, hoping that this time, I am human enough to pass.