Welcome to Europe: please accept the cookies
Every morning I open twenty tabs to start working. Twenty different sites: the bank, the hosting provider, the client panel, the newspaper, a SaaS tool, the Social Security portal, a Cisco technical page, a home-automation forum, a PDF on the Spanish official gazette. And before I can do anything useful, each one of those tabs greets me with the same little window: a giant banner, sometimes full-screen, asking me whether I accept the cookies.
I've been doing this mental arithmetic for years. Five seconds per banner. Twenty sites a day. One hundred seconds. Almost two minutes daily. Multiply that by 365 days a year, by hundreds of millions of Europeans, by twenty years of ePrivacy enforcement followed by GDPR. We're talking, literally, about centuries of aggregated human time wasted clicking "Accept all" because nobody reads anything.
And the question is always the same: why are we doing this? The honest technical answer is that this could have been solved with a preference set once, directly inside the browser. Settings → privacy → my default cookie policy: essential only / functional / accept all. Three options. One screen. Five seconds. Forever.
There was even a technical attempt at doing exactly that: the Do Not Track HTTP header, sent by the browser to every site. It died of neglect because nobody respected it, and because European law decided, in its infinite wisdom, that it was better for every individual site to ask you separately. Result: users click blindly, companies pay lawyers to draft policies nobody reads, and the web turns into a modal minefield.
The hidden cost: legal pages nobody reads, written by everyone
The other day I was helping a client with their new website. Small company, four employees, one landing page, one contact form. Before they could publish anything we had to draft the mandatory EU legal pages: legal notice, privacy policy, cookie policy, general terms, data controller information, legal basis for processing, ARSULIPO rights (access, rectification, suppression, opposition, limitation, portability, opposition — I no longer remember the order), information about international transfers if you use Google Fonts or Cloudflare, separate cookie banner, granular consent manager. For a four-person website.
Altogether it added up to more legal text than actual company content. And the client rightly asked which human visitor was ever going to read all that. The answer, of course, is nobody. But if it isn't there, you can be fined.
Multiplied by the tens of millions of European SMEs, we're talking about legal work being drafted in parallel by all of Europe, practically identical in every case, that nobody reads and that mainly serves to protect each company from the regulation itself. It is the perfect closed loop: the regulation creates the work needed to comply with the regulation. Meanwhile, that same SME hasn't been able to put those hours into making their product better, answering a customer, or simply living.
While Europe was drafting cookie policies, another continent was testing autonomous cars
I recently wrote here about the European approval of Tesla FSD by the Dutch RDW, and how I was able to test it personally over more than 2,500 km. It was a brilliant technical experience. But it was also a political experience, because while I had been able to try the system in the United States with total normality, in Europe we'd been waiting for years for a type approval that any other continent on the planet had already solved.
The RDW finally approved it on 10 April 2026. Why did it take so long? Because Europe isn't a market — it's a layered collection of regulations. Every agency, every Member State, every Brussels sub-directorate had something to say about why this system needed more studies. Meanwhile, technology that was already saving lives elsewhere couldn't be used here. European bureaucracy doesn't just make us lose time: it makes us lose technology, and sometimes lives.
FSD is just the most visible example. The same thing happens with drug authorisations, industrial type approvals, building permits, electrical installations, grid connections for photovoltaic plants. Europe turns any innovation into an administrative Calvary. And then we are surprised that the world's biggest tech companies are American or Chinese.
Talking to a European bank is exactly like talking to a country
This week I tried to do something that in 2026 should be utterly trivial: connect my company's accounting tool to my bank's transaction feed. Any reasonable person would assume this is a solved problem. PSD2 exists. Open banking exists. APIs exist.
The European reality goes like this. My bank — one of the big ones — still doesn't allow clean integrations with external software on many of its product lines. Yes, there's an "official" PSD2 API, but joining the partner programme means months of paperwork, banking certifications, notarised contracts, and Word forms from 1998. To automate accounting reconciliations that any American bank lets you do with two clicks.
And if you call the bank for help, you find out that inside the bank there isn't anyone who really understands what you're asking. They pass you from department to department. Each department sends you to the next. Each one asks you to email a generic address nobody reads. Three weeks later you're back where you started, with zero progress, and you start to understand that talking to a European bank is exactly like talking to a country: many counters, no connection between them, infinite forms, and a persistent feeling that the person on the other side of the glass doesn't actually want your request to move forward.
This, in 2026, after PSD2, after the Digital Markets Act, after the European Data Strategy. It's still easier to download the PDF statement and key in the transactions by hand than to ask your bank to open a decent API connection.
The real cost of bureaucracy: health
All of this might sound like the complaint of a tired business owner, and in part it is. But there is something deeper I have been observing for years, in myself and in clients across Europe.
European bureaucracy doesn't just steal time: it steals health. The number of people I know — entrepreneurs, freelancers, professionals, parents simply trying to handle a school enrolment — who are literally embittered by the administrative weight of living in Europe is enormous. People who go to bed thinking about the form due tomorrow. People who lose entire nights trying to understand why their quarterly tax return doesn't add up. People who wait months for an answer from the administration while their business bleeds out.
When you've been twenty years inside this system, your body notices. Chronic nervousness, poor sleep, the constant feeling of having an administrative sword of Damocles hanging over your neck. One simple procedure ends up meaning years and years and years of nerves and a worsened life, distributed across thousands of micro-interactions that, added together, do enormous damage.
And this is where I want to arrive at something rarely said out loud, but worth raising — at least as a hypothesis.
What if Europe's low birth rate is also bureaucracy?
Europe has been debating its low birth rate, its demographic problem, its fertility rates below generational replacement for decades. The usual analyses talk about expensive housing, low wages, lack of work-life balance, labour pressure. All of that is true. But I think the diagnosis is missing one uncomfortable piece: the chronic wear that comes from living under an administration that puts obstacles in your way at every step.
Choosing to have a child isn't just an economic decision. It's an emotional one. And human beings don't make brave emotional decisions when they are chronically embittered, exhausted, with their nervous system worn down by the small daily frustrations of every form, every banner, every call to the bank, every impossible appointment, every form that breaks halfway through.
It is well documented that chronic stress affects fertility — biologically and psychologically. And although it would be simplistic to attribute Europe's demographic problem solely to bureaucracy, it is no exaggeration to think that this permanent administrative bitterness is part of the cocktail that means many Europeans, by the time they reach the age of deciding whether to bring children into the world, no longer feel the vital energy to do so.
Whoever thinks this is an exaggeration should try starting a company, hiring an employee, registering as self-employed, opening a bank account in another EU country, getting a mortgage as a foreigner, or having a university degree from outside Spain validated. And then come back and tell me whether they still have the appetite for long-term life projects.
It's not nostalgia, it's arithmetic
I'm not asking Europe to stop regulating. Some European regulations are brilliant and have set worldwide precedents. What I'm asking — what many of us are asking — is that regulation should account for its own hidden cost. Every cookie banner has a price. Every duplicated form has a price. Every procedure that takes three months when it could take three minutes has a price. And those prices aren't paid only in lost hours: they are paid in innovation that doesn't happen, in companies that aren't created, in children that aren't born, in mental health that erodes.
If Europe wants to remain competitive, it isn't only about spending more on AI or subsidising chip factories. It is, above all, about giving citizens back something very basic: the time and the mental energy that today are being taken from them in a silent, daily paperwork war. The rest will follow.
Meanwhile, I'm going to accept the cookies on the tab I have open, reply to the bank's email asking me yet again for the same documents I sent them three months ago, and go back to writing code. And yes — the fatigue of bureaucracy can be felt all the way to the fingertips.