Has society and our world become too complex for the majority of people living in it?

This post emerges out of a little frustration that I've been having with my aging parents. But that frustration got me to asking how other people who have even a little cognitive decline can manage to keep everything straight? Allow me to elaborate by example. My parents recently sold a plot of land in Idaho. In order to get the deal done, dad had to furnish the water rights that were issued forty years ago, and my dad has to get the original power of attorney that he did back in 2006 for my mom (who has dementia) because a copy won't do. The title company insists, "It has to be the original." I managed to find the water rights certificate, but getting a hold of the original power of attorney is going to be some effort considering that my dad stored documents in shoe boxes for years, and he's never been good at organization even when his mind was firing at 100%.

Just trusting someone's word that good enough is good enough "used" to work for people...you know, back in the seventies. Nowadays life is significantly more complicated. There are passwords for every single website out there, and you've got to have a different one and a different user name to give yourself better protection against hacks and fraud. I myself have about seventy passwords, and yes, they are all different. Sometimes I get confused and have to have them reset. It's driving me crazy.

What about tasks associated with daily living? When I see what it takes for my parents to get going (they don't have much energy these days) I realize that beyond getting out of bed and washing their bodies and feeding, they need to shop for their food, they need to know how to use the remote control that powers their satellite television, they need to know what time of year it is so that they can get taxes done, they need to get maintenance on their car, they need driver's licenses and picture I.D.'s renewed, they need to pay all the bills that come in, and the house needs cleaning. Of course we've hired help, but there are other duties on top of all this.

These days for the dog to get washed by a dog washer, it has to have certificates that say it is healthy and has all of its shots. This means an appointment has to be made with a veterinarian, certificates need to be collected, and they need to be stored in an area where they are readily retrievable to hand over to the damn dog washer. Whatever happened to the day when people would just wash your dog because it was dirty?

The car needs to be inspected once a year for certificates related to pollution and safety inspection. You need insurance on everything. Then there are doctor's appointments and filling out paperwork for medicare. Let's not forget that the furnace filters need to be changed, smoke detectors need new batteries, water softener needs salt, light bulbs need changing, clothes need to be washed, bedding needs to be changed, and drugs need to be picked up at the pharmacy.

Did the phone ring? Is someone trying to sell you something? Is it a robot auto-dialer asking for a survey only to bait and switch you to something else?

Honestly, I think that the world has become so complex that it is difficult to understand and many (particularly the aged) are vulnerable. Given the amount of time that all of the above tasks take to sort through, how can people take time to do any truth-seeking? How can we make intelligent decisions regarding policies, our retirements, or elect global leaders when life is already so complicated? Maybe that's why we're getting more and more people dropping out of the system either through disability or just becoming homeless. Just think for a moment of the problem-solving skills it takes to get a bank account, and you'll realize that any mental illness or cognitive decline poses huge roadblocks to becoming a productive member of society.

So I'm curious, do any of you out there think that society is unnecessarily complex? Or is it just me?