# Twentieth Floor Disorder **February 22nd, 2023**  There’s an amazing Webtoon (Korean version of a manga) series I’ve been reading for the past few years called Tower of God. I’m going to call it a manga for the entirety of this post in order to keep things simple. It’s quickly become my favorite manga rivaling One Piece for the number one spot. What drew me in to this story is how similar the adventure is to One Piece. The world is huge with tons of lore behind the characters and various clans. Without spoiling too much, most of the people in this manga are trying to reach the last floor on the tower to have their dreams realized. The journey increases in difficulty as people reach higher floors which makes reaching the final floor a grueling task. People lose friends along the way, gain new ones, create enemies, and backstab others all in an attempt to reach the last floor. I’ve always enjoyed how similar the story is to real life. One aspect that stuck out to me was when Bam (the main character) and his teammates reached the 20th floor. The 20th floor is an interesting one because of something called “20th Floor Disorder”. 20th Floor Disorder is essentially when people decide not to take any more tests after taking the exam on the 20th floor. This prevents them from advancing to the next floor. They become content with being E-Rank status, which is one of the lowest ranks for someone climbing the tower. There’s many different elements from Tower of God that you can compare to real life, and I think the 20th Floor Disorder is one of them. A recurring theme I’ve noticed is that once people hit a certain age (usually around age 30), they decide to stop learning new things and shut off their brains to new ways of thinking. Simply put, learning new things is challenging. Sometimes it requires you to think in ways that your brain isn’t accustomed to, or the subject you’re learning/practicing simply doesn’t come to you easily. This eventually leads to frustration and a retreat into a safe haven: comfortability. When things are comfortable to you, they’re predictable. You don’t experience any uneasy sensations because you understand what you’re dealing with. The challenging part is facing something new because that requires you to fight against your brain a bit and to not give up, succumbing to comfortability. I think what happens is that life becomes predictable to most people. Sleep, eat, shower, work, and repeat. Anything outside of that routine seems foreign and almost annoying to deal with. Why spend time learning something challenging when you can easily turn on Netflix to catch your favorite series and give your brain its much needed dopamine hit? Before I continue, I’d like to say this: There is absolutely nothing wrong with not wanting to learn new things. There’s nothing wrong with simply existing and not constantly striving towards some greater objective. It’s perfectly fine to just be. With that being said, I think another reason people decide to stop challenging themselves and learning new ideas is because they assume they’re too old. There’s this weird misconception that I’ve seen appear in multiple threads on the internet, is the statement: “am I too old to start learning [**insert skill**]”. People probably assume that if they haven’t been working towards some skill since they were an infant, then the due date for learning the skill has already passed. Life is extremely long despite how fast the days seem to fly by. The more you practice the better you’ll become. The power of compounding is amazing, especially when you’ve set your mind on learning a new skill. You can’t lose. If you’re constantly practicing and correcting the mistakes you make, you’ll only get better with time. In fear of this post becoming longer than it should’ve been, I think the easiest way to avoid 20th Floor Disorder is to constantly challenge yourself and to learn new skills. <a href="https://www.edutopia.org/neuroscience-brain-based-learning-neuroplasticity" class="anchor-highlight">Learning physically changes the brain</a>. Have the courage to constantly reinvent yourself and challenge old beliefs, discarding what is no longer useful. Whatever it is that you decide to do, don’t end up <a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/old-man-yells-at-cloud" class="anchor-highlight">yelling at the clouds when you're old.</a> > "I think the root of creativity is not inventing novel ideas out of nothing, but simply drawing novel edges on a large graph. I think a lot of adult loss of neuroplasticity, adult retreat to conservatism, adult inability to enjoy new art or music, all these various hatreds of newness are just people who decided to stop learning, to stop adapting, and thus lost the ability to do so" - Alice Maz