면 지나다

the more time goes by

지나다 is the verb for time or a thing passing by. Most of these lines use it in the doubled frame 지나면 지날수록, literally 'if it passes, the more it passes', which is how Korean says 'the longer it goes on, the more...' — several lines here use it of things getting worse or of AI changing over time. A few of the other lines are not this pattern at all: the ordinary word for last week is built from the same verb. Because it is fused into the conjugated form, there is no separate word on the page to point at.

Register: neutral spoken