The ultimate digital 'I don't care': 'Please enter a password different from your previous one'

Finally, the battlefield has fallen silent.

After tucking my two children into bed and navigating the minefield of stuffed animals left in the living room, I sit down at the edge of the dining table.

In front of me are some half-folded children's clothes and a school contact book I was in the middle of writing in.

And my laptop, opened for the first time in hours, emits a cold light as if to say, 'Who are you?'

All I want to access is my 'usual site' to order the groceries I need for next time.

Yet, the response I get on the screen is,

'Incorrect password'

a heartless sentence.

Rejected by the inorganic error message, I click 'Forgot your password?' for what feels like the umpteenth time.

When I finally open the email that arrived and reach the blank field asking me to 'Please register a new password,' I see a glimmer of hope.

'Oh, I think this was it.'

Even though I forget what I wrote in the contact book in five seconds, for some reason, the moment I try to find a 'new string to set,' the 'old password I was supposed to have forgotten' pops up from the depths of my brain as a vivid sequence of numbers.

If I submit this as the 'new one,' I won't have to change anything. The moment I hit the Enter key with that conviction, red text appears on the screen as if mocking me.

'You cannot use the same password as before.'

It's scarier that 'you remember' than that 'you forgot.'

……I don't care.

No, to be precise, I was able to enter it exactly because I 'knew' it.

It seems the gatekeeper of the digital world doesn't believe the fact that I 'forgot,' but treats the very act of me 'trying to return to the past' as some kind of serious crime.

Come to think of it, this is quite a surreal scene.

I can remember exactly what my children ate today, yet I can't recall the string of characters my past self supposedly set.

As someone as vague as I am, in order to prove that I am myself, I must deny what I recognize at this very moment (my previous password) and present a 'new string of characters' that I have never even met before.

It feels like a strange sense of alienation, as if I were being forced by a resident of 'Through the Looking-Glass' to forget my own name.

In fact, this is due to the system's tenacious memory.

The gatekeeper seals my 'past' away as something worthless.

Many of the world's clever machines carefully store the old password I finally remembered—thinking, 'Oh, was it this one?'—as a hashed past log (recorded after being broken down into a complex sequence of numbers so the original characters cannot be known).

They don't 'know' the contents of my password. But the moment I try to carve out the string I just remembered, and it matches the past log perfectly, they coldly pass judgment, saying, 'That's one you've already used.'

'Anything remaining in the history is already 'expired' in terms of security.'

That is their argument.

The moment you go through the 'forget and reset' procedure even once, that string is sealed away as something contaminated.

In other words, the system is not rescuing me from my amnesia; it is forcing me to overwrite my past as something worthless.

Wise people in the past said, 'Change your passwords regularly,' but wise people today have started saying, 'If there's no risk of a leak, it's better not to change them.'

If that's the case, then why!?

Why must I bury the familiar password I've lived with for years every time this rare accident of 'forgetting' occurs?

In the 'Looking-Glass' world, I fabricate a new self.

In the end, I admitted defeat.

I add a superfluous '!' or '1' with no context to the end of my familiar string and slip past the gatekeeper's censorship.

'Alright, I've remembered it this time.'

As I tell myself that, I realize that five minutes later, I'm already unsure what that symbol at the end was.

The gatekeeper on the other side of the screen will likely add my new password to its collection of 'past logs' this time, quietly and accurately waiting for the day I forget it and come back again.

If I were to write in tomorrow morning's contact book, 'Last night, my password denied that I was myself,' it would only confuse the nursery school teacher.

I let out a sigh and gently closed the browser.

As I look at the pile of laundry I've been meaning to fold, I can only pray that tomorrow won't be so busy that it makes me forget even the 'new me' I just set up today.

▼ For those who want to explore a bit more 'wonder'

The inflexibility of digital systems is similar to why AI struggled to draw human 'hands' well for so long. It knew the data, but it didn't understand the essential structure.

No matter how complex the digital world may seem, it all boils down to '0's and '1's. This is a slightly surprising story about how the roots of such cutting-edge mechanisms actually lie in ancient Eastern philosophy.