50 Pictures Showing The Same Place Decades Apart, Revealing How Time Changes Everything

You probably know as the saying goes – time changes things. Or time heals things, depending on the context. Well, you get the gist of it.

Usually, people hear this phrase said to them when they experience loss, heartbreak, disappointment, or trauma. When saying this, people mean that with time the feelings about the situation will get easier, or at least the feelings will mutate in a way that will hurt in a different, more survivable way. 

But is time actually a healer? Well, the answer is complicated. Essentially, time itself does not have the ability to heal, but the other things that come with it, like changes, and experiences can help with it. 

As some specialists say time equates to opportunity. Basically, it all depends on how/if a person uses the opportunities the time presents to move on, to shape their future. For example, one person shielding themselves from the rest of the world and the other engaging in community (friends, family, and people like that) will result in different outcomes, even if they are trying to move from a relatively similar thing. 

It should be noted that these two aforementioned ways aren’t the only ways a person can react to something that crushes them—they were just two of the simplest examples. As it always is: to each their own. 

Of course, in some cases, there are things that prevent people from letting themselves be healed by time and opportunities. Whether it’s prolonged grief or other mental illnesses, refusal to let go, or denial—there can be plenty of underlying reasons why time isn’t such an effective medicine. And so, time moves on, but these people don’t. 

The thing is that you cannot stop time from moving, no matter how much you want to. It just keeps going on, sometimes slowly, and sometimes faster. In fact, sometimes you just don’t even feel how fast it goes and things change along with it, while you feel the same. 

In order to appreciate how time can change things, today we've gathered a list of pictures that show just that. Here, you will find places as they looked in the past and then how they looked a little later, showing how time and certain events that came with it altered them. 

In our opinion, such comparisons are perfect examples of all the things we talked about today—how time heals, or might not, and how change keeps happening whether we like it or not.

After all, sometimes it isn’t easy to wrap your head around this stuff, but pictures like these can help. Or, they might just send you spiraling even more. And still, they’re pretty interesting to look at, aren’t they? Share your takes on this topic with us in the comments!