What does it mean to be Secure?

You lock your front door every night. You check it twice before bed, maybe even give it a gentle tug to make sure it’s really latched. You feel secure. You sleep soundly, confident that you’ve taken all the necessary precautions to protect yourself.

But are you really secure?

What if I told you that while you were checking your front door for the third time, a stranger was sitting in a coffee shop across town, effortlessly accessing your bank account through that public Wi-Fi network you connected to earlier? Or that smart doorbell you installed to make your home more secure is currently streaming video to servers you’ve never heard of, in countries you’ve never visited?

Welcome to a world where being secure and feeling secure are not just different things, they’re often opposite things.

The illusion beneath the illusion

Let’s start with something simple, your password. You’ve been told to make it complex, unique, and change it regularly. So you create “MyB@nkP@ssw0rd2025!” and feel proud of your digital responsibility. But here’s what nobody tells you: that password, no matter how complex, is stored in a database somewhere, probably in plaintext, definitely on servers you’ve never seen, managed by people you’ve never met, protected by security measures you’ll never know about. Your “secure” password is only as secure as the weakest intern at the company that stores it. The moment you create the perfect password, you’ve handed control of your security to someone else entirely. The very act of protecting yourself requires you to trust strangers with your protection.

But it gets stranger. That password manager you installed to handle all those complex passwords? It’s a single point of failure that contains every key to your digital life. You’ve solved the password problem by creating the ultimate password problem. You’ve become more secure by becoming infinitely more vulnerable. This isn’t poor planning, it’s the nature of security itself. This isn’t theoretical. LastPass, one of the most trusted password managers, was breached in 2022, exposing millions of encrypted password vaults.

Every security measure exists within a system, and systems have boundaries, dependencies, and failure modes that extend far beyond our control or understanding.

The theater of our own performances

Bruce Schneier called it “security theater”, but I think he didn’t go far enough. We’re not just watching a performance; we’re the actors, directors, and audience of an elaborate play where nobody knows the script.

Consider your daily digital routine. You update your software for security patches, but each update introduces new code written by people you don’t know, tested in scenarios you can’t imagine, for threats that don’t exist yet. You’re performing the ritual of security without any real understanding of what you’re securing against. Remember the CrowdStrike incident in July 2024? A single security update designed to protect millions of Windows computers, instead brought down airlines, hospitals, banks, and emergency services worldwide. In one moment, the very mechanism meant to make us safer became the source of global chaos. Flights grounded, surgeries delayed, financial systems frozen; all because we trusted that someone else’s security update would make us more secure. The cure became the disease.

You enable two-factor authentication and feel safer, but you’ve just tied your digital identity to a physical device that can be stolen, a phone number that can be hijacked, or a company that can disappear overnight. You’ve added a security measure that makes you more secure against password theft and less secure against phone theft. You haven’t increased your security; you’ve changed its shape.

The performance continues. You use a VPN to protect your privacy, creating a detailed record of exactly when you wanted to hide and who you trusted to help you hide. You’ve made your desire for privacy a documented, trackable event. The tool designed to make you anonymous has made you uniquely identifiable as someone who wants to be anonymous.

The deeper we go, the less we know

Here’s where things get truly unsettling: the more you understand about security, the more you realize how little you actually understand.

When you were young and naive about technology, you worried about obvious threats: don’t give strangers your password, don’t click suspicious links. The rules were simple because your world was simple. But as you peel back the layers of how technology actually works, each answer reveals ten new questions.

You learn that your keyboard might be logging your keystrokes, so you become careful about what you type. Then you discover that your phone is tracking your location even when GPS is “off.” Then you realize your smart TV is listening to your conversations. Then you find out your car is reporting your driving habits to insurance companies. Then you understand that your fitness tracker knows more about your health than your doctor does. Each new piece of knowledge doesn’t make you more secure, it makes you more aware of how insecure you’ve always been. The ignorant sleep peacefully. The informed don’t sleep at all. Security awareness is a one-way door: once you walk through it, you can never go back to not knowing.

But here’s the real twist: the people who know the most about security often have the least secure lives. Not because they’re careless, but because perfect security is incompatible with functional living. The security expert who understands every threat is paralyzed by the impossibility of defending against all of them. The average user who understands none of the threats lives normally, accidentally achieving better practical security through blissful ignorance.

The trust machine that runs on distrust

Security is fundamentally about trust, but modern security is built on the assumption that trust is impossible.

Every security protocol assumes that everyone is lying. Every authentication system assumes that identities are fake. Every encryption scheme assumes that communications are being intercepted. We’ve built a massive infrastructure of trust on the foundation of universal mistrust.

But here’s the paradox that makes it mind-bending, this system of organized distrust only works if we trust it completely.

You trust your bank’s security because you distrust everyone else’s. You trust Signal’s encryption because you distrust Facebook’s data handling. You trust your password manager because you distrust your own memory. Every act of security is an act of transferring trust from one place to another, never eliminating it. The chain of trust extends infinitely backward. You trust your encryption because you trust the mathematics behind it. You trust the mathematics because you trust the mathematicians who proved it. You trust the mathematicians because you trust the institutions that trained them. You trust the institutions because you trust the society that created them.

At some point, the chain of trust disappears into assumptions you can’t verify, built by people you’ll never meet, based on principles you take on faith. Security isn’t about eliminating trust, it’s about hiding the places where trust is required so we can pretend it doesn’t exist.

The future that’s already here

The most unsettling realization is that we’re already living in the future we were trying to prevent.

Remember when we worried about Big Brother (the government) watching us? We have solved that problem by creating thousands of Little Brothers (companies like Google, Meta, Apple) who watch us voluntarily, constantly. We avoided government surveillance by embracing corporate surveillance. We prevented authoritarianism by creating something subtler and more pervasive, surveillance capitalism that feels like convenience. We were so focused on preventing the dystopia where our privacy was taken by force that we didn’t notice the dystopia where we gave it away freely.

The threats we prepared for were external, hackers, criminals, foreign governments. The threats that actually materialized were internal, our own desire for convenience, connection, and control. We built defences against strangers breaking in while we were busy inviting them in through the back door.

What security actually means

So what does it really mean to be secure? After all this, I think the answer is both simpler and more complex than we imagined.

Security isn’t a state you achieve; it’s a spectrum. It’s not about building perfect defences but about moving gracefully between imperfect compromises. It’s not about eliminating risk but about choosing which risks to accept and which to transfer to others. Real security means accepting that you will never be completely secure, and that the attempt to become completely secure will make you less secure in ways you can’t predict. It means understanding that every security measure is also an insecurity measure, that every protection creates new vulnerabilities, that every solution becomes a new problem. Security means making peace with paradox. It means being comfortable with discomfort, certain about uncertainty, secure in your insecurity.

Most importantly, security means recognizing that it’s not a technical problem with a technical solution. It’s a human problem that requires human judgment, human values, and human acceptance of human limitations. The person who asks “Am I secure?” is asking the wrong question. The right question is: “What am I willing to risk, to whom am I willing to trust, and how will I live meaningfully in a world where perfect security is perfectly impossible?”

Security isn’t about finding the right answers. It’s about learning to live with the wrong questions.