Your identity, scattered across other people's databases
Think about how many organizations currently hold a piece of your identity. Your government issued your birth certificate and passport. Your employer or university issued your professional credentials. A handful of platforms issued your login accounts. Each of these records lives inside a database that some other party owns, controls, and can revoke, alter, or lose access to independently of you. You don't hold your identity, you hold a promise that these various institutions will keep vouching for it when asked, and you have essentially no portability between them.
This creates a repeating pattern every time you need to prove something about yourself to someone new: you re-explain, re-submit documents, and wait for that new party to independently verify your claim, often by contacting the original issuer directly or trusting a copy of a document that could in principle be altered. Every interaction starts from zero trust and rebuilds it from scratch. There's no way to hand someone a compact, independently checkable proof of a fact about yourself, instead you hand them access to an account or a document and hope the verification pipeline behind it works.