We've all pressed Ctrl+C a million times. Linux solved this in the 1980s — the rest of us didn't.

Pay attention to the next thing you copy on your computer. Actually watch yourself do it.

You don't do one thing. You do two: you select the text, then you press Ctrl+C. And if your hands are on the mouse, it's often worse — select, right-click, hunt for "Copy" in a menu, click it. Two steps, sometimes three.

Pasting is the same trap. You don't just paste — you first click into the place you want the text to land (activate the field, position the cursor), then you press Ctrl+V. Two steps again.

So the simplest possible action — move this text from here to there — is really four discrete actions: select, copy, click-to-place, paste.

Now here's the part that got me: you do this maybe a thousand times a day. Coding, replying to messages, filling forms, moving a link, grabbing an error to paste into a search bar. It's so automatic you've stopped seeing it. It's the background radiation of using a computer.