The Endless Bureaucratic Bullshit: Papers, Stamps, and Signatures Everywhere You Turn

Humans have this sick obsession with papers and forms and stamps and signatures, and it seems to be never-ending. It’s everywhere—fucking everywhere around the world, at least in the Western world, and I live in Asia now where it’s even more pronounced, like a goddamn religion.

I remember living in Japan back in the 1980s, trying to register cars and motorbikes. Over my five years there, I had three cars and one motorbike, and I even helped the captain of my ship when he bought a motorbike—got all his paper-shuffling done. It’s basically a solid day of your life wasted. You go to this place, the equivalent of the DMV in the United States, and it’s not that you have to wait in line for two hours with a number like some chump. No, it’s at your own pace, but you’ve got this stack of paperwork, and you have to drag it to various numbered kiosks. They shuffle through it, stamp the shit out of it, keep some papers, give you more, and send you to the next one.

That crap takes hours—pure, unadulterated bureaucratic torture.

But this story is different. This is my saga since paying cash and buying a cool motorbike in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in early 2020, and what I’ve had to go through over the years just to stay “compliant” with all the papers and small fees. I’ll have a story for you at the end about how I know people in their 70s and 80s in rural Thailand who’ve never been compliant about a damn thing—that’ll be my closing punch. So let’s get into it.

[It’s Saturday in Thailand, and my only decision point about a post being public or for members is whether it’s published on weekdays (free) or weekends (paid). Don’t want to worry about it?]