Why Your Years Feel Like Weeks
What two days without a screen taught me about why years disappear.
👋 Merhaba, I’m Burak. Each week, I share lessons from 26+ years of building, investing in, and mentoring startups across emerging markets, from the early internet days to today’s AI revolution. 🧿
My laptop battery died last week. Apple said two days. I panicked.
Something strange happened instead. Time slowed down. I looked up more. I thought longer before reacting. Two days without a screen, and I felt weeks had passed.
Then I got it back. Within hours, everything accelerated again. Meetings blurred. Emails piled up. Tuesday became Thursday without explanation.
Your brain on autopilot stops recording. Screens put it in a low-encoding state. Two hours of scrolling feels like fifteen minutes because almost nothing gets written to memory. Routine becomes a blur.
The fix is uncomfortable: force novelty. Break patterns. Pay attention on purpose — what your coffee tastes like, what the street sounds like.
Here’s the paradox.
A life that feels slow in the moment, uncomfortable, unfamiliar, device-free, feels rich looking back.
A life that feels fast, comfortable, routine, screen-filled, feels terrifyingly short in retrospect.
I’m not giving up my laptop.
But I’m taking more two-day breaks from it.
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