About a week had passed since I began stumbling across the rocky terrain of retirement paperwork with little to show for my efforts except several new passwords, a collection of confirmation numbers, and an increasingly urgent desire for a Retirement Sherpa. I had also begun the first week of the fall semester—my last—and one afternoon I was home eating leftover taco salad while listening to Fresh Air. Host Tonya Mosley was interviewing Annie Lowrey about her new book, The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time—and How to Fix It.
I stopped chewing.
Lowrey was describing the very world I had spent the previous week wandering through: forms, portals, applications, eligibility requirements, documentation, telephone calls, administrative delays, and the enormous quantities of unpaid labor ordinary people must perform merely to obtain services supposedly created for their benefit. Her argument was that this labor constitutes a kind of tax—not on our money but on our finite allotment of time.
Apparently, I had company.
I had spent the previous week believing I was trapped in my own private retirement hellscape, hacking through Medicare, Social Security, CalSTRS, CalPERS, health insurance, employment dates, passwords, and authentication codes while wondering why nobody had invented the Retirement Sherpa. Now a public-policy writer was calmly explaining on National Public Radio that millions of Americans were trapped in much larger versions of the same maze.
Lowrey’s imagery was considerably less Dantean than mine. She was writing a sober public-policy polemic. I was beginning to suspect that Medicare had been designed by demons.
Nevertheless, we were fellow travelers.
What Lowrey was describing could be called the Administrative Burden Reversal: the point at which obtaining relief becomes as burdensome as—or more burdensome than—the problem the relief was designed to address.
Consider the exquisite logic.
You need assistance because you are sick, poor, disabled, unemployed, overwhelmed, elderly, or otherwise vulnerable. The institution responds by assigning you an unpaid administrative job requiring stamina, executive function, internet access, technological competence, documentation, persistence, telephone endurance, and large quantities of free time.
In other words, before the government will help you with the problem that has diminished your ability to function, you must demonstrate an extraordinary ability to function.
The lifeboat has arrived.
Unfortunately, there is a ninety-seven-page application attached to it, which you must complete while drowning.
Once you see this mechanism, you begin noticing how dramatically the Overton Window of acceptable bureaucratic labor has expanded. Create an account. Verify the account. Create a password. Authenticate the password. Enter the security code. Upload the document. Prove your identity. Locate the certificate. Call the agency. Navigate the telephone tree. Wait on hold. Get transferred. Get disconnected. Call again. Discover that the department you need is open between 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. on alternate Wednesdays during months containing the letter R.
None of these demands, considered individually, seems outrageous.
That is how the system gets you.
One hoop becomes five hoops. Five become twenty. Eventually you are spending an afternoon proving to an institution that you are the same person the institution has been corresponding with for thirty years, and nobody finds this remarkable.
My own predicament was comparatively benign. I was trying to emancipate myself from forty years of labor and begin collecting retirement benefits. Nobody was threatening to take away my oxygen. If I had to spend another afternoon figuring out Medicare, I could make another cup of coffee, complain theatrically, close the laptop, and return tomorrow.
Lowrey’s examples revealed what happens when the stakes are much higher.
Someone with impaired breathing cannot obtain assistance because the benefits portal was open for only two days. Someone loses access to the machinery necessary to exercise the right to vote and cannot retrieve it from the digital morass. A person with autism spends hours on the telephone being bounced among disconnected functionaries who cannot coordinate with one another and is ultimately denied care. An aspiring entrepreneur spends two years and $200,000 trying to obtain permission to open a store before finally abandoning the venture. A woman who should legally owe no tax is instead taxed at forty percent because she cannot obtain the IRS certificate proving her eligibility. A physician applies to renew her work visa, repeatedly asks the government about its status, receives no meaningful response, and eventually loses the ability to practice medicine.
At that point, bureaucracy ceases to be merely annoying.
It becomes power.
And buried inside that power is a magnificent hypocrisy.
Government agencies demand almost supernatural precision from the people who depend upon them while frequently granting themselves enormous latitude for confusion, delay, contradiction, lost paperwork, unanswered telephone calls, and administrative chaos.
Call this the Asymmetrical Competence Principle: the bureaucratic arrangement whereby the citizen is required to perform with meticulous accuracy while the institution reserves the right to operate with astonishing sloppiness.
Miss your deadline by one day and your application may be denied.
The agency ignores you for four months and this is called processing.
Enter one incorrect number and you have provided inaccurate information.
The agency loses the entire application and asks you to send another copy.
Fail to respond to a letter by the specified date and you may lose your benefits.
The agency fails to respond to six of your letters and apparently everyone is having a busy year.
You must know which form to submit, where to submit it, when to submit it, what documentation must accompany it, which boxes must be checked, which signatures must be witnessed, and which deadline must be observed. The institution may provide contradictory instructions, maintain an obsolete website, transfer you to the wrong department, disconnect your call, misplace your paperwork, and leave your application untouched until your livelihood is endangered.
There is rarely symmetry in the consequences.
Your mistake is a failure.
Their mistake is an inconvenience.
And this was the revelation that arrived while I sat at home eating leftover taco salad during the first week of my final semester. My retirement paperwork had begun as a personal comedy: an aging professor attempting to escape forty years of employment only to discover that freedom was seventeen thousand forms away. But Lowrey’s argument opened a much larger window. The same administrative machinery that was making me crotchety could make someone else destitute, untreated, disenfranchised, unemployed, or unable to practice her profession.
Suddenly my Retirement Sherpa seemed less like a comic fantasy and more like an indictment.
People should not require Sherpas to obtain things they are legally entitled to receive.
A functioning society should not place Mount Everest between a vulnerable citizen and the assistance supposedly waiting for him at the summit. And if it insists upon building the mountain, it cannot demand that every citizen climb it with the precision of a flawless neurosurgeon while the institution responsible for maintaining the trail conducts itself like puppies playing tackle football.
Yet that appears to be the arrangement.
Your paperwork must be perfect.
The bureaucracy merely has to exist.
Cinemorphosis 
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