Some people wake up and greet the morning with gratitude for another blessed day. I wake up and greet another password reset. As an author, commentator, and newsletter editor, I spend half my life on the internet, usually researching some obscure detail that seemed crucial at the time. Yet here I am, forever trapped in a state of password purgatory, an endless loop of “Try again,” “That’s incorrect,” and my personal favorite, “You’ve used that password before.”  The site misses the point – I want to use a password I used before so I can get in to the darn site.

What is particularly aggravating is when a site rejects my login but refuses to tell me whether it was the username or the password that offended its delicate sensibilities. Just a vague, judgmental shake of the digital head, like I’m interrupting something important. Our Amazon Prime account has joined the rebellion too — I’m locked in a full-blown password standoff, where Amazon acts like I’m some suspicious drifter trying to steal my own subscriptions.

I’m not sure when I lost control of my digital identity, but I suspect it was around the time websites started demanding a capital letter, a special character, a number, and the blood of a firstborn grandchild. My life has become a scavenger hunt for clues I apparently left for myself, only to discover I must have been feeling unusually cryptic that day.

Let’s face it: passwords have become a royal pain in the backside. And at sixty-nine, with a memory that’s begun taking more time off than I do, I don’t see the situation improving. I understand the idea — passwords keep your account from being hacked by some creepy nerd living in his mother’s basement. And believe me, I wish the fleas of a thousand camels upon every hacker who ever lived. Yet somehow, despite decades of digital warfare, I have never once heard of a hacker being arrested. The day I read that headline will be the first.

I let my computer save as many passwords as it wants, and the rest I scribble on slips of paper that I promptly lose. Some are in drawers, some in old notebooks, and a few may have achieved full archaeological status by now. Meanwhile, my devices seem personally offended if I try to use them without reintroducing myself. My phone, my iPad — both seem convinced I might be an imposter who simply looks like me.

Every corner of my digital life demands its own secret handshake: my website, bank account, Apple account, Microsoft account, Mailchimp, Spotify, and on and on. And every security expert insists I must never, under any circumstances, reuse a password. I can’t remember what I had for breakfast, and I’m expected to recall a reset from eight weeks ago?

Then there are cookies. Every website now begs, pleads, or threatens me into accepting their cookies before showing me a single sentence. And unless those cookies contain chocolate chips, I don’t know what good they do me. All I know is they sound suspiciously like another way to compromise my already-compromised passwords. My trust level is low.

And don’t even get me started on that absurd box I have to check to “prove I’m human.” As if my greatest fear in life is being mistaken for a highly motivated toaster. Sometimes checking the box isn’t enough — no, then I’m handed a pop quiz: “Select all images containing traffic lights,” or “Identify which objects in this photo are cats disguised as mailboxes.” I half expect the next one to ask how many chocolate chips are in a cookie. Do they really think I’m secretly from the planet Zoro trying to infiltrate your Spotify account of Frank Sinatra’s greatest hits? If an alien species has mastered intergalactic travel, I promise you they can get past CAPTCHA.

Try simplifying your digital life — I dare you. That’s when you discover you have 214 accounts, 36 defunct logins, and a suspicious subscription to a service you’re fairly certain you never asked for. Somewhere out there is a company that believes I am passionately interested in hiking mountains. I assure you, I am not.

There has to be a better way. Facial recognition is a great idea that rarely works. And until someone invents it, I’ll be over here, clicking “Forgot Password” like it’s a spiritual practice, an act of surrender to the mysterious, maddening gods of the modern age.