Why do I take it personally when a system fails me?

You wait forty minutes for a bus that never comes. Somewhere in that wait, the story changes. It stops being 'the bus is late' and becomes 'they did this to me.' This is how an untrained mind works. It takes a plain fact — a delay, a rejected form, a dropped call — and writes a story where you are the target. But bureaucracy has no target. A broken system fails the same way whether you are standing there or not. This habit costs you. Each retelling asks you to believe that a system's failure is proof of your own importance to it. Practice will not fix the system. It trains you to catch the extra story before you believe it.