Time is broken. Honestly, if you feel like you’ve aged twice as much as the calendar says since January 2020, you aren't imagining things. We are living through a period where the sheer density of global shifts makes it feel like we’ve crammed twenty years in a decade. It’s a phenomenon often called "historical compression."
Think back to 2019. It feels like a different century, doesn't it?
The pace of change used to be a steady crawl, but now it’s a sprint that nobody signed up for. We've seen a global pandemic, the largest land war in Europe since 1945, the sudden explosion of generative AI, and economic swings that would make a Victorian banker faint. When people talk about feeling "historical fatigue," they’re reacting to this exact weight.
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The Reality of Historical Compression
The phrase "there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen" is usually attributed to Vladimir Lenin. Whether he actually said it or not, the sentiment has never been more accurate than right now. We are witnessing the collapse of traditional timelines.
Take technology. In a "normal" decade, we might get a few iterative updates to our phones or a new social media app. Instead, we went from "AI is a fun sci-fi concept" to "AI is writing my emails and threatening my job security" in about eighteen months. That’s twenty years of digital evolution compressed into a single news cycle.
It’s exhausting.
Psychologists actually have a name for part of this: the "oddball effect." When we are faced with brand-new, intense experiences—like a lockdown or a banking crisis—our brains process that information more deeply. This makes time feel elongated. Because the 2020s have been nothing but "oddballs," our internal clocks are convinced we’ve been here for ages.
Why the Economy Feels Like Twenty Years in a Decade
Economically, we’ve cycled through an entire generation's worth of drama in a few years. We had the flash-crash of 2020, followed by a literal "everything bubble," then the highest inflation in forty years, and then the most aggressive interest rate hikes since the 1980s.
Usually, these cycles take 15 to 20 years to play out.
Look at the housing market. In many parts of the US and UK, home prices jumped by 40% or more in a two-year window. That is a decade’s worth of appreciation happening while you were busy learning how to bake sourdough. For young people trying to buy a home, the goalposts didn't just move; they were strapped to a rocket ship and fired into another zip code.
Then there’s the workplace.
The shift to remote work was predicted to take twenty years. Companies were slowly, painfully debating "work from home Fridays" in 2019. By April 2020, the entire global knowledge economy had moved to Zoom. We achieved twenty years of cultural and corporate evolution in roughly eight weeks. You can’t go back from that. The genie is out of the bottle, and he’s wearing pajama bottoms while attending a board meeting.
The Geopolitical Pressure Cooker
If you look at the map of the world, the tectonic plates are grinding faster than ever. The "End of History" era—that relatively stable period after the Cold War—is officially over.
- The return of industrial warfare: The invasion of Ukraine shattered the illusion that major territorial wars were a thing of the past.
- The realignment of trade: "Globalization" is being replaced by "friend-shoring" and "de-risking." This is a fundamental shift in how the world breathes, and it’s happening at breakneck speed.
- The rise of the "Global South": Countries like India, Brazil, and Indonesia are asserting themselves in ways that experts thought would take until the 2040s to materialize.
Everything is happening at once. It’s like the world’s history book is being written by someone who drank twelve espressos and is trying to beat a deadline.
The Mental Toll of Living Through Too Much History
Human beings aren't really wired for this much "newness." Our ancestors lived in worlds where the tools their grandfathers used were the same ones they used. Today, the "tools" we used five years ago are practically museum pieces.
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This leads to a specific kind of burnout. It’s not just work stress; it’s world stress. When you feel like you’re living twenty years in a decade, your nervous system stays in a state of high alert.
The "Perma-crisis" is a term that gained traction for a reason. It describes a state of living through a sequence of disastrous events with no clear end in sight. From climate change milestones being hit earlier than predicted to the rapid-fire collapse of social norms, the cumulative effect is a sense of "temporal dysregulation." Basically, we’ve lost our sense of where we are in the timeline.
How to Survive the Compression
You can't slow down the world, but you can change how you interact with the firehose of information.
First, recognize that "doomscrolling" is a physiological trap. Your brain thinks it's gathering vital survival information, but it's actually just spiking your cortisol. If it feels like twenty years are happening in ten, it’s because we are the first generation to witness every single global micro-event in real-time.
Second, prioritize "slow" information. Books, long-form essays, and physical hobbies provide a counterweight to the frantic pace of the digital world. They ground you in a different kind of time.
Third, acknowledge the grief. It’s okay to miss the "boring" years. There is a specific kind of mourning for the stability we thought we had. Acknowledging that the world has changed more in five years than it did in the previous twenty helps make sense of why you're so tired.
Moving Forward in a Hyper-Accelerated World
We have to get better at "flexible planning." The five-year plan is basically dead. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that a "black swan" event is always lurking around the corner. Resilience is no longer a buzzword; it’s a survival requirement.
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Investing in transferable skills, maintaining a "boring" emergency fund, and building local community ties are the only real defenses against a world that won't stop accelerating.
The feeling of living twenty years in a decade isn't going away. In fact, as AI begins to automate the very process of innovation, the next five years might feel like another thirty. The key isn't to run faster; it's to find a way to stay steady while the ground moves.
Actionable Insights for the "Compressed" Era:
- Audit your digital intake: Switch from "breaking news" alerts to weekly deep-dives to reduce the feeling of constant upheaval.
- Focus on 'Lindy' skills: Learn things that have been useful for decades (writing, logic, basic repair, social navigation) rather than chasing every fleeting tech trend.
- Physical Grounding: Engage in activities that have a fixed, slow timeline—gardening, woodworking, or long-distance running—to reset your internal clock.
- Scenario Planning: Instead of one rigid life goal, create "if/then" brackets for your finances and career to handle sudden shifts in the global landscape.