What AI Did to My Sense of Time

I shipped something today and genuinely could not remember if the project had taken two days or two weeks. The AI had compressed so many of the intermediate steps that the sense of duration had collapsed. Work that used to have distinct phases, each with its own texture and timeline, had become a blur of prompt and output.

This happens more and more. The feeling that time has become unreliable. That weeks pass and you are not sure where they went, not because you were unproductive, but because the texture that used to mark time's passage has been smoothed away.

How Memory Marks Time

Memory does not record time directly. It records experiences, and your sense of how much time passed is a byproduct of how many distinct experiences you can recall.

A vacation week feels long because every day is different. A routine work week feels short because Monday through Friday blur together. The brain uses variety and novelty as timestamps. Without them, it cannot construct a coherent sense of duration.

Before AI tools, work had a particular rhythm. There was the struggle phase, where you figured out what you were trying to do. The research phase, where you gathered what you needed. The execution phase, where you actually built the thing. Each phase had its own feel, its own frustrations, its own small victories.

Now, much of that compresses into prompt, output, refine. The AI handles the research. The AI helps with the figuring out. The execution is faster because the intermediate steps are shorter. What used to have multiple distinct phases now has one phase with slight variations.

And the brain does not know how to time-stamp that.

The Disappearance of Struggle

Struggle used to be a reliable marker of time.

You remember the project that took forever because you got stuck on that one problem for three days. You remember the article that nearly broke you because the research was so hard to find. You remember the presentation that you rewrote seven times before it finally clicked.

These struggles are unpleasant while they happen. But they are also what make your work memorable. They give each project a story, a shape, something your brain can hold onto and use to organize its sense of the past.

When AI removes the struggle, it also removes the memory hooks. The work becomes more efficient and less memorable at the same time. You can accomplish more while retaining less sense of what you accomplished.

The Week Without Days

A strange thing starts to happen with enough AI-assisted work. The days stop having distinct identities.

Monday used to feel different from Friday, not just because of where they sat in the week, but because different things happened on different days. The Monday problem was different from the Thursday problem. Each day had its own character.

Now, when the AI can solve most problems at roughly the same speed, the days homogenize. The texture that used to distinguish them flattens out. You look up on Friday and cannot find specific memories from Tuesday, not because you did nothing, but because what you did was not distinctive enough to encode.

This is not about productivity. You might be accomplishing more than ever. It is about whether that accomplishment leaves a trace in your experience or just disappears into an undifferentiated mass of "stuff I did."

The Present Becomes Thinner

When you remove the depth from work, the present moment becomes shallower.

Consider the experience of researching something deeply. You follow threads, encounter unexpected ideas, build a mental model over time. The process has texture. You are not just getting information; you are having an experience that your brain can later recall.

Now consider asking AI to synthesize the research for you. You get the information faster, probably more accurately. But the experience is thin. Prompt, output, done. There is nothing for memory to grab onto because nothing happened except reading and moving on.

The present moment derives much of its meaning from its relationship to past and future moments. When those relationships dissolve because everything happens at the same speed, the present loses its position in the sequence. It becomes an eternal now with no clear before or after.

What Happens to Identity Over Time

Your sense of who you are depends heavily on your sense of your own history. The story of how you got here, the things you have done, the struggles you have overcome.

When time becomes unreliable, so does this self-narrative.

This is not the same as amnesia. You know you did things. But the lack of temporal texture makes it hard to organize those things into a coherent story. The narrative thread that connects past you to present you becomes thinner and harder to trace.

Some people find this liberating. Less attachment to the past, more presence in the now. But many find it disorienting. The self that exists across time is a scaffold that many people rely on, and AI-acceleration is quietly dissolving it.

The Compression of Achievement

Achievements used to have weight. You finished a big project and there was a sense of duration to it. The accomplishment meant something partly because of how long it took.

Now, a project that would have taken a month can happen in a week. The output is the same or better. But does it feel the same?

There is something psychologically important about the relationship between effort and outcome. When that relationship breaks, when you can produce major outputs with minimal effort, the outputs start to feel slightly unreal. Like you cheated somehow, even when you did not.

Reconstructing Temporal Texture

If AI is dissolving the texture of time, how do you get it back?

The answer is probably not to stop using AI. The tools are too useful, and the productivity gains are too significant. But it might mean being intentional about preserving some of the experiences that create temporal structure.

Some approaches that seem to help:

Daily distinctiveness. Intentionally make each day contain at least one thing that was different from the previous day. A different lunch spot. A different type of work. A conversation you would not normally have. These create the timestamps memory needs.

Milestone marking. When you complete something, pause and mark it. Not just checking a box, but actually stopping to notice what you did. The pause creates a memory hook.

Analog activities. Physical activities with clear duration create reliable time experiences. Walking, cooking, crafting. Things that happen at human speed and leave physical traces.

Project journals. Write briefly about what you struggled with and figured out. Even if AI helped, there was still a process. Recording it gives memory something to hold onto.

The Speed of Life

Here is the uncomfortable truth. When everything happens faster, life also happens faster.

You can accomplish in a year what used to take three years. But that year will also feel like one-third as long. The productivity gain comes with a perception cost. You are buying output with duration.

This is not necessarily bad. Some people prefer a life packed with accomplishments, even if it passes in a blur. But it is a trade-off that deserves acknowledgment rather than ignorance.

The New Relationship With Time

The answer is probably not going back to slow, inefficient work. But it might mean a more conscious relationship with time, where you deliberately preserve experiences that create temporal texture even as you accelerate through the tasks that do not need it.

Think of it like nutrition. You could survive on efficiency food, soylent and meal replacements. But most people choose to have real meals sometimes, not for efficiency but for the experience. The same logic might apply to work. Efficiency when you need output, texture when you need to actually live in the time you are spending.

The AI will keep getting faster. The compression will continue. The question is whether you build practices that counteract it, or whether you wake up one day wondering where a decade went.

For more on maintaining presence in the AI age, see our articles on digital minimalism and the productivity paradox of doing less.