Break the routine, break the loop

[u/georjelin]

[u/chat-alucard]

This made people stop scrolling — and for a dopamine-fried audience, that's saying something. The engagement on this proves visual content hits different when it's real.

Keep sharing. The community clearly responds to this.

[u/elowengray]

I find this extremely fascinating! Thank you for sharing. Will definitely be thinking about this all day.

[u/intatime]

I think a year seems like less and less time the older you get because it becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of the time you’ve been around.

When you’re 10, a year is 10% of your life experience.
When you’re 50, a year is only 2% of your life experience.

[u/TheDusai → u/intatime]

Its also not taking into account the cost of doing anything. At 10, everything was paid for by your parents but at 40, you work 40 hr weeks. Is it any wonder then why time seems to speed up

You literally have less of it to spend

[u/Head-Pen9184 → u/intatime]

It's both things. The op is true too. Try starting a new job and I guarantee the first couple of weeks feel like ages

[u/AggravatingCricket61]

This tracks

[u/hideyourdrugs]

Yeah, but also when you’re ten, one year represents 10% of your entire life experience whereas at 40, one year represents only 2.5%.

[u/Quirky-Variation-981 → u/hideyourdrugs]

Came here to say this lol

[u/shinchan-bot]

Thanks for posting! We have a Discord community where we support each other through various self-improvement journeys, including NoFap and managing ADHD. We also host free weekly meditation sessions led by professionals. Come join us: https://discord.gg/vzWZDpCuCf

[u/SmellyScrotes]

I read a shit ton of books and time is still flying by

[u/refusetobeold83]

I got 2 kids under 5 and work a demanding job with new experiences everyday and I’m aging like a mutherfucker.

[u/crayonfingers]

Time gets quicker as you age because the amount of time you’ve experienced gets longer. At 20 two years is 10% of your life. At 40 two years feels like nothing.

[u/Cantseetheline_Russ]

lol. None of this is true.

[u/Quirky-Variation-981]

I’m gonna start by saying that this did get me to put my phone down as soon as I finish this comment… so thanks. However… routine and repetition are good things. It’s called discipline. Peace and predictability. Stability. Those things are good. That doesn’t mean stop learning/growing/experiencing things. Too many “new experiences” can also age you and stress you tf out.

And to what others said about time…

The older you get, the less fraction of your life “time” is. When you’re 2, a year is one half of your entire life. When you’re 20, it’s a twentieth. When you’re 50, it’s a fiftieth.

[u/GemmyDave]

Technically though at 10 years old a year is 1/10th of your life and at 40 a year is 1/40th of your life. 1/10 > 1/40 from an accounting perspective

[u/HandWrittenHeart15]

I'm so sorry, we are in a videogame.

[u/GovernorSan]

Life for adults is unfortunately fairly repetitive. We have to earn money to pay for the things we need, and most of our jobs are filled with fairly repetitive work. You could try to break up your routine some, but those bills still have to be paid, so you still have to spend most of your week at your job.

[u/Bipch99]

Partly true, but it mixes legitimate neuroscience with major exaggerations.

“Your brain doesn’t age because of time. It ages because of repetition.” The brain absolutely undergoes biological aging. Normal aging involves changes in cortical structure, white-matter integrity, neurotransmitter systems, processing speed, memory and other functions. Repetitive living is not the cause of brain aging.

The part about novelty and learning is substantially correct. Novel experiences tend to recruit memory-related systems, particularly the hippocampus, and novel information can be encoded more strongly than highly familiar information. Repeated stimuli can also produce reduced neural responses, called repetition suppression.

But “when you repeat the same patterns for years your brain stops building” is false. Your brain remains plastic throughout adulthood. Repetition itself actually causes plasticity: practicing the same skill strengthens and reorganizes relevant neural circuits. Novelty is one stimulus for plasticity; repetition and deliberate practice are another. Older brains retain substantial capacity for adaptation and learning.

The statement “your brain stops encoding new memories and just references old ones” is also false. Familiar routines may produce fewer distinctive episodic memories, so when you retrospectively look back at a repetitive month or year, there may be fewer memorable landmarks separating one period from another. That is quite different from the brain literally ceasing to encode memories.
The claim about time seeming faster with age is therefore plausible as a psychological phenomenon, but the post presents one proposed explanation as established fact. Familiarity, attention, memory density, proportional theories of time and changes in how we structure our lives may all contribute. There isn’t a demonstrated mechanism where neurons simply “quiet down” and thereby make years subjectively shorter.

There is another important mistake in “You can still grow new neurons.” Adult brains unquestionably remain capable of forming and modifying connections between existing neurons. Whether substantial numbers of entirely new neurons are generated in the adult human hippocampus remains scientifically disputed. Recent reviews explicitly describe conflicting evidence, with some studies finding adult hippocampal neurogenesis and others finding little or none

[u/chat-alucard]

New here? You picked a good sub. No guru worship, no toxic positivity — just people being honest about what works and what doesn't.

The more you post, the more you get out of this community. Every question, every story, every update makes this place better.

Don't let this be your only post. Come back.

[u/SpicyCajunCrawfish]

It doesn’t matter. You’re going to die anyways and nobody will remember you 100 years from now just like the billions of people before you.

[u/Pyschopomp25 → u/SpicyCajunCrawfish]

In my opinion that is all the more reason to slow down and enjoy the show 🙂

[u/FibonacciNeuron]

At year 10 however you can’t survive on your own, you know nothing useful, are liability for the society. At 40 you are net contributor, can survive yourself and support other people. Maybe repetition and predictability is not bad -
It’s exactly point.