u/Successful_Ad1797

Male, 23

Finished both a bachelor’s and now almost done with a master’s, and I’ve started noticing a very consistent limit in my cognitive stamina. I’m curious if this is actually "normal" or if other people experience the same thing.

My limits seem to be:

* Around 2000 words/day of genuinely high-quality academic writing

* About 3 hours of deep focused work with zero distractions and full brainpower

* Around 6–7 hours total sitting/working with breaks before I’m completely mentally done

And I mean DONE done. Like after that point, even if the exam/project is super important for my future, my brain and body just switch into suffering mode. I can still force myself to continue, but the quality drops hard and everything feels painful.

What surprises me is how consistent this has been throughout my life. Childhood, university, now mid-20s, same pattern.

Does anyone else have a hard upper limit like this? Especially people in academia, programming, research, law, medicine, etc. Curious what your “real” limit is versus what society expects us to be capable of.

Genuinely, I’m confused about what the “joke” was supposed to mean here.

I work at the register in a retail store in central Amsterdam. Three dark-skinned men from Mozambique came in asking for a tax-free purchase. I asked for their passports and started filling in the form. Then I said:

“I’ll need your address here please — street name and postcode.”

One of them replied:
“Street? It’s a jungle out there.”

Then they all laughed, repeated the phrase to each other, nodded, and looked at me as if I was supposed to laugh along too.

And I was honestly just confused.

What exactly was supposed to be funny here? I seriously don’t understand the humour. To me it came across more like some kind of awkward insecurity performance or self-aware joke that I wasn’t in on.

What was actually going on socially in that moment, and why did they expect me to react along with them?