I've got maybe 10 accounts that I really care about keeping secure - things like my bank and such where if someone got a hold of my account it would be a tough mess to sort out. Each of them has a unique password. But for most services I have login credentials for, I am not actually giving them any sensitive information. While I now use a password manager for these, before I just had a simple system for altering an otherwise standard set of passwords. It's not too hard to remember redd1t[standardsecurepassword], h@ckernews[standardsecurepassword], p0rnhub[standardsecurepassword], etc but as far as some random attack script is concerned these are all extremely unique and secure. If a human were specifically looking at it they could easily figure out the pattern and make some smart guesses, but even then I already give different emails to different accounts so I can tell who is selling my email addresses to spammers, and I had a few different secure passwords that I'd rotate, so only a tiny fraction would actually be in jeopardy. And again, there's nothing of value to be gained by hacking into these accounts. Overall I had maybe 15 genuinely unique passwords to remember, hardly a herculean feat. Now with the password manager, I still don't use it for my sensitive accounts, so I have like 8 passwords to remember; a relatively minor improvement.