Paperwork

Several days of hunting up and through boxes of old papers to find documentation for a Medicaid application for my wife hasn't put me in a good mood. I understand why they check back five years, considering the dishonesty prevalent today, but living in a small mobile home doesn't leave much room for years and years of bank statements, bills, and other documentation, which is why they are crammed away in the garage, shed and coal bin in poorly labeled plastic boxes. They wouldn't be that well organized if it was up to me, but my wife took care of that. I never liked paperwork and forms, but at 70, paper shuffling has absolutely no appeal to me. I would rather spend the last of my days doing something I like, like tramping the woods, writing, taking photographs, and researching history. Tax preparation alone wastes huge amounts of time for most Americans.

Computerization was supposed to make everything simpler and reduce paperwork. In actual fact, it has done just the opposite. And government is also way behind the curve. I do most banking, shopping, etc on-line which eliminates the forms the government wants submitted. Fortunately we have unreliable internet, so I have kept on getting paper statements, bills, etc. just in case. I can see that some folks are going to end up with deep problems from over reliance on the web.

Everything is being made more and more mind-numbingly complex and time consuming at the same time the population is rapidly aging and becoming less able to handle complexity. Can't we actually SIMPLIFY things rather than making them ever more complicated?