Digital Amnesia Is Your New Personality: A Eulogy for Every Password You've Already Forgotten Today

Let us take a moment of silence for everything you have lost.

Not your keys. Not your dignity at last year's work holiday party. We are talking about something far more tragic: the 47 to 300 online accounts you have created since roughly 2007, each one a tiny digital tombstone marking a moment in time when you thought, yes, I definitely need an account on this website that sells artisanal beard oil and also somehow has a forum.

You do not remember the username. You do not remember the password. You do not remember why you were on that website at 11:43 PM on a Tuesday in February of 2018. But the account is still there. Breathing. Waiting. Holding your old email address and a half-filled shopping cart containing a $34 candle shaped like a wizard.

The Archaeology of Your Own Digital Identity

Here is a fun game you can play at home. Go to any website you have not visited in more than two years, click "Log In," and watch what happens inside your brain. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. You will stare at the username field like it is a blank canvas and you are a goldfish who has just discovered abstract art.

You will try your email. The regular one. Then the old one from college that you technically still have access to but only use to receive promotional emails from a pizza chain that closed in 2015. Then the embarrassing one you made in middle school that contains the word "shadow" or "dragon" or both.

None of them will work.

So you will try the passwords. The childhood pet one. The childhood pet with a capital letter and an exclamation point. The childhood pet with a capital letter, an exclamation point, and a number at the end because some website in 2011 decided that was security. The childhood pet plus your birth year. The childhood pet plus a different year because you were already paranoid back then for no real reason.

Still nothing.

You will then click "Forgot Password" and this is where we enter the real psychological event horizon of the modern internet experience.

The 'Forgot Password' Button Is a Mirror and You Do Not Like What You See

Clicking "Forgot Password" is not a neutral act. It is a confession. It is you, standing in the digital town square, announcing to no one and everyone simultaneously that you have completely failed to maintain even the most basic continuity of self across your online existence.

The button knows. The button has always known. The button has been waiting for you with the patient, condescending energy of a librarian who watched you look for a book for twenty minutes before asking for help.

So you click it. A reset email gets sent to an inbox you may or may not still control. If you are lucky, it goes to your current email. If you are the version of yourself who made this account during a chaotic period of your life — and statistically, you were — it goes to an address attached to a phone number that belongs to someone else now.

Congratulations. Your account is unrecoverable. That wizard candle is lost to time.

The Password Manager You Downloaded and Immediately Forgot the Master Password To

At some point — probably after a particularly humiliating round of account lockouts — you decided to get serious. You downloaded a password manager. You watched a YouTube video about it. You felt, for approximately one afternoon, like someone who had their life together.

You added three passwords to it.

Then you got a new phone and forgot to transfer the app. Or you forgot the master password. Or you remembered the master password but forgot which email you used to create the password manager account, which is a level of irony so dense it should be studied by philosophers.

The password manager now sits on your phone like a locked safe for which you have also lost the combination. It is passwords all the way down. It is chaos wearing a productivity disguise. It is you.

Security Questions: A Hall of Horrors

And then there are the security questions. The ones you answered in 2013 with answers you thought were clever at the time.

What was the name of your first pet? You had three pets before 2013. You cannot remember which one you picked. You try all of them. None of them match because you spelled one of them wrong on purpose for security reasons and now you cannot remember how you misspelled it.

What street did you grow up on? You have moved four times. You are not sure what "grew up" means in a legal context.

What is your mother's maiden name? This one you know. This one you will always know. And yet somehow, somehow, the website says it is wrong, and now you are questioning your entire family history.

These questions were designed to help you recover your identity. Instead, they are actively dismantling it in real time.

Peak Account Saturation: A Medical Diagnosis

Here is the thing nobody wants to say out loud: we have simply created too many accounts. The average American adult has somewhere between 70 and 150 online accounts, depending on which study you read and how much of your will to live you want to sacrifice reading it. Seventy. One hundred and fifty. For context, that is more accounts than most people have meaningful human relationships.

We signed up for things because a website wouldn't let us see the content without signing up. We signed up for things because we needed to leave a review one time. We signed up for things because a Groupon deal expired in 24 hours and the pressure was real and we were not thinking clearly.

Now those accounts exist somewhere in the digital ether, little phantom versions of ourselves frozen in time, still subscribed to newsletters, still holding outdated shipping addresses, still technically members of a cheese-of-the-month club we forgot to cancel before the free trial ended.

They are out there. They are us. And we will never, ever log back in.

A Modest Proposal for Living With This

There are a few ways to handle the password amnesia crisis. You could finally, genuinely set up a password manager and actually use it, which requires a level of sustained executive function that, let's be honest, is not why you're reading this website.

You could write your passwords in a notebook, which security experts hate and which also means you will lose the notebook.

Or — and this is the UnsiZeros-endorsed approach — you could simply accept that you are a different person every time you create a new account, and that person is gone now, and their login credentials went with them, and that is fine. Beautiful, even. You are not forgetting your passwords. You are shedding digital skin. You are a constantly evolving internet being who cannot be contained by a single username.

You are also locked out of your Netflix account again.

Click "Forgot Password." You know how this goes.