I’ve googled it and I’ve read the definition but I still have no idea what it actually is and how it affects a person, particularly in their day to day lives
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The formal definition of a bureaucracy is a government where decisions are made by “the state” instead of the people or representatives of the people. But nobody uses bureaucracy that way.
Whenever people use the word bureaucracy, it’s almost always in one of two ways:
1) you encounter a situation where a process or organization is seemingly way too complicated or contains way too many approval steps than seem to be required by common sense
2) you encounter a situation where two people in the same organization or two steps in an approval process give you directions that seem to be the exact opposite of each other — that one side doesn’t seem to know what the other side is doing
When organizations get large, jobs become more specialized (vs. startups where everyone works on everything). When jobs become specialized, it’s easy for each job to become disconnected from what other jobs are doing. This creates the bureaucracy that most people experience.
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