One of my favorite inventions in recent years is face unlocking. Without needing to lift my fingers and type in the numbers, I can get straight into my phone with just a look. Now there is a new technology designed to replace the password called the “passkey”!

Passkeys turn your phone into something a bit like a wallet, which you can use to store membership cards to all of your apps and services. When you need to log in to a website, you’ll just have to tap a button on your phone and your passkey wallet will let you in without any worry.

And how does it keep this wallet safe? By using the same “biometric (生物统计)” check your phone uses — a face scan or a fingerprint that cannot easily be forged.

Passkeys won’t just save us from having to remember passwords but, perhaps logging in with a passkey will actually be much safer than typing a password. This is because it uses a technology called “public key” cryptography (密码) which is one of the building blocks of the Internet — and is how computers have securely communicated with other computers for so many years. To put it simply, it works a bit like a key, instead of a password.

With a password, the website has to keep a database (数据库) of everyone’s passwords to check against when you log in. But with a passkey, when you create your account on a website, it will effectively create a new lock and key. The website will keep the lock, ★ .

I think it’s a really clever idea, and that passkeys are going to make our digital lives even safer. So, next time you’re complaining that you can’t remember your password, don’t worry too much. It won’t always be like this!

In the face of all kinds of changes in nature and life, our survival and development have been closely tied to our complexity. An idea called self-complexity refers to people’s thoughts about their different roles. It is the key to a strong and lasting identity (the sense of self) which can help us go through unexpected changes we all face. With self-complexity, people have developed various parts to their identities. For example, imagine a woman who sees herself as student, wife, daughter and tennis player and who has a wide variety of life experiences. Social scientists would say that she has high self-complexity. On the other hand, a man who regards himself only as a student or only as a member of the hockey team and who has limited life experiences would be said to have low self-complexity. For those with high self-complexity, the various parts of the self are separate. This means the positive and negative thoughts about a certain part of the self won’t affect (影响) thoughts about other parts.

A large body of research shows that if you depend too much on any one part of the self, you will become fragile. When one’s identity connects too closely with the only one part that he cares deeply, then one will easily get stressed and burnt out when unexpected changes appear. This is especially true for an athlete during periods of change when his main—and all too often, only—sense of identity feels at risk. Yet while it may be heightened for athletes, it’s a pattern that holds true in all walks of life: if you want to be excellent and experience something fully, then you’ve got to go all in, but only to a point.

If your identity becomes too involved in any one part, then you are likely to suffer when things change. So what you need to do is to challenge yourself to put the various parts of your identity into a whole. This allows you to emphasize (强调) and reemphasize certain parts of your identity at different periods of time. The result is a fluid (流动的) sense of self.

Developing a fluid sense of self doesn’t mean you can be careless or just do things without effort. Caring deeply about the people, activities, and projects you love is undoubtedly the key to a rich and meaningful life. The problem is not caring deeply; it is when your identity is too closely fixed to any single goal.