Time really doesn’t treat everyone and everything equally. By one’s late forties, it’s easy to see what people have “aged well” or “aged poorly,” while in objects, certain materials hold up a lot better than others. A car, left in a field for decades will inevitably begin rusting down into nothing over time, while plastic and glass, unless there is some significant force, will be around for centuries.

Some of the largest examples of this are in nature, where water, wind, and sun have been steadily working before we had even emerged from the oceans. The Grand Canyon, for example, took the Colorado River around five to six million years or “work,” wearing down rocks piece by piece. 

Physicists and other scientists call this particular phenomenon entropy, as new matter or energy is never created, but everything slowly breaks down over time. Originally used in thermodynamics, most people know it from everyday occurrences in nature. Mountains get shorter, cliffs erode and dunes are slowly washed away. 

Sometimes the combination of patterns creates a sort of emergent art piece, as colors and shapes are formed. Human beings have an amazing ability to find beauty in the most random collections of things, so it’s not surprising that many of these images were wildly popular on the net before being gathered here.

Other examples are more about satisfying human curiosity. From food items stashed away for decades to years of dust creating rug-like layers, most people might find these sorts of edge cases interesting, as we tend to not encounter them on a daily basis. It might be a great way how to satisfy that childhood curiosity of “What if?” 

As Geoffrey Chaucer wrote, “Time and tide wait for no man,” which is a good lesson to remember, regardless of what you do, time will pass. An older form, “And te tide and te time þat tu iboren were, schal beon iblescet,” has been attributed to an 11th-century manuscript, but regardless of authorship, the idea stands. Most people prefer to not think too much about aging, but it’s unhealthy to deny the fact that we will age. 

So the images here also can be seen as quasi-educational, showing precisely how time (and tides, for that matter) wear things down. If you start to look carefully, you’ll find examples in most parts of life, from paths etched through grass where people want to cut a corner, to certain buttons in elevators being pressed significantly more frequently. 

Many of the examples here focus on paint, from graffiti to interior design. While each layer might seem tiny, just a millimeter thick, these pictures show just how quickly they add up. Jerry Seinfeld had a bit describing how repainting his apartment always made him nervous, as he could feel it “closing in” around him. 

Seeing some of these images shows that in the long run, he is right. If a landlord (or series of landlords) are lazy enough, they will just paint over the previous layer, year by year. While this might actually help with insulation, the tenant is technically paying for a slowly shrinking apartment, which, at the very least, is an interesting metaphor for the housing crisis. 

One other fringe benefit is it’s a good way to see what products and brands know how to pass the test of time. Sadly, a lot of modern products are woefully designed and break down after a few years, if not a few months of use. Lists like this help separate the actually quality items from cheap copies. 

The last decade of mass smartphone use has been a great way for people to document all these interesting and curious findings, to such a degree that there are whole internet groups devoted to it. The “Mildly Interesting” subreddit is one such example. So if found that this list wasn’t enough, Bored Panda has got you covered, check out our other list of stuff that time left a mark on and this article about things that got really, really worn down.