As you attempt to retire, you will eventually enter the bureaucratic labyrinth and submit yourself to its ritual humiliations: security codes, two-factor authentication, forgotten usernames, password requirements apparently derived from nuclear-launch protocols, contradictory menus, and websites whose navigation systems seem designed to ensure that no citizen ever reaches his intended destination. After enough exposure, you will feel anger rising inside you. Eventually, a human being will answer the telephone, and you will experience an almost irresistible urge to unload the entire accumulated grievance upon her.
Don’t.
This is the Misplaced Rage Fallacy: the tendency to direct your fury at the human being who answers the telephone rather than at the labyrinthine system that necessitated the telephone call. After forty-five minutes of authentication codes, password resets, automated voices, contradictory menus, and a website apparently designed by Kafka’s IT department, you finally reach Linda in Benefits and instinctively regard her as the architect of your suffering.
She isn’t.
Linda did not design the website. Linda did not decide that your password must contain twelve characters, one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, two numbers, a hieroglyph, and the blood type of your maternal grandfather. Linda did not send the authentication code to a telephone number you haven’t used since the Obama administration. Linda did not create the seventeen-item telephone menu through which you wandered like a starving hiker lost in the Sierras.
Linda is trapped in the maze too.
She just has a headset.
This brings you to a second discovery, the Institutional Humanity Paradox: the larger, colder, and more impenetrable an institution becomes, the more surprising it is to discover that it is populated by ordinary and frequently decent human beings. There can be a yawning disparity between the personality of a bureaucracy and the character of the people who work inside it. The website treats you like a suspicious package abandoned at airport security. The woman who eventually answers the telephone treats you like a human being.
This happened to me with CalSTRS. I already had a username and password, dutifully preserved in my records, and naturally neither one worked. I entered them again, because one of the foundational beliefs of modern life is that typing the same rejected password a second time may cause the computer to reconsider its position. It did not. I called CalSTRS, entered the automated telephone labyrinth, requested a callback, and eventually heard the voice of an actual person from the technical-support department.
She was wonderful.
For twenty minutes, she stayed on the telephone while we reconstructed my digital identity. She explained that a new system introduced about a year earlier had rendered my previous credentials obsolete, which was comforting in the same way that learning your house key no longer works because someone replaced the house is comforting. Then she patiently escorted me through every miserable step required to establish a new account. She never became impatient. She never spoke to me in the singsong voice adults sometimes use with people who cannot locate the settings menu. She never suggested that the problem was obvious and that any reasonably evolved primate should have solved it without assistance. She was kind, competent, patient, and helpful.
Eventually, she transferred me to another department so that I could arrange a Zoom appointment. There I encountered another pleasant woman who tried to find me an opening. Unfortunately, the appointments were booked for approximately six weeks. She suggested that I call again the following week and see whether something had opened.
What was I supposed to do—blame her?
She had not personally filled the calendar. She had not constructed a retirement system in which someone approaching retirement must schedule a meeting six weeks into the future to discuss how to stop working in the present. She was simply sitting at her desk, looking at the same overstuffed calendar I was confronting from the other end of the telephone.
She was a cog in the machine, but she had not built the machine.
This distinction matters. Being rude to the people who take your calls is not merely bad manners; it is strategically idiotic. You are punishing innocent people, alienating precisely those human beings who possess the knowledge necessary to rescue you, and burning emotional fuel you will desperately need during your next gladiatorial encounter with a retirement application.
Save your rage for the proper target: the system.
Be kind to Linda.
Thank the technical-support representative who spends twenty minutes resurrecting your account. Be gracious to the benefits counselor who cannot manufacture an appointment that doesn’t exist. Remember that these people also have mortgages, families, passwords, insurance companies, malfunctioning websites, dental appointments, aging parents, and bureaucracies of their own. At five o’clock they remove their headsets and become civilians again, whereupon some other institution begins tormenting them.
Never confuse the personality of an institution with the character of the people imprisoned inside it.
And when you feel yourself reaching the point at which you might begin screaming at innocent strangers, close the laptop. Walk away from the battlefield. Have a healthy snack. Lie down for a restorative nap with your eyeshades and cucumber mask. Allow your nervous system to forget the existence of authentication codes.
Tomorrow you can return refreshed in body and spirit.
Cinemorphosis 
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