My favorite thing about pain is that time slows down while you’re experiencing it.

Life passes fast. Work, eat, play, sleep, repeat — and the more identical each day is to the one before it, the faster the whole thing runs together. A year of routine compresses into almost nothing you can point at. You get to December and genuinely cannot account for where it went.

Throwing some pain into the mix stops it from being one big blur.

Why it works that way

Time slows as you heal, and memories ingrain themselves into your mind — that’s just the natural learning response to pain that all of us have. Your brain is built to remember the things that hurt, because remembering them is what kept your ancestors from doing them twice.

So pain gets recorded at a higher resolution than everything else. A comfortable Tuesday gets compressed and thrown out. An injury, a hard failure, a stretch where something genuinely hurt — those get written down in detail, and they stay.

Which means the periods you’d never volunteer for are the ones you can actually still see. Ask someone about the hardest year of their life and they’ll give you specifics. Ask them about a smooth one and they’ll give you a shrug.

The routine is the real problem

The monotony isn’t neutral. It’s actively eating your life. Every day that’s identical to the last is a day your brain files under “already have this one” and declines to store.

Pain interrupts that. It forces the machinery to pay attention again. Not because suffering is noble, and not because you should go looking for it — but because it’s the thing that reliably breaks the blur, and it’s worth understanding that mechanism instead of only ever trying to escape it.

What I take from it

Discomfort is going to show up whether you plan for it or not. The choice isn’t whether you get any — it’s whether the pain you get is the kind that teaches you something or the kind that just happens to you.

Hard training, difficult work, things you’re bad at and do anyway. That’s pain you selected. It slows time down, it stores itself as memory, and on the way out it leaves you more capable than you started. Same mechanism, better return.

The alternative is a smooth year you won’t remember and didn’t get anything out of.

I’d rather feel it and keep it.

That’s most of the thinking behind grit over gadgets — the useful part was never the equipment.