The Mystery of Entropy & the Will to Create
Why both my Roof and Ceiling Failed at the Same Time
What a weird time to be alive.
I must admit to, sometime in the past in a wistful moment of imagination, I’ve asked, “What was it like to be alive during these crazy, history-changing moments, to be looking on as our world changes right before our eyes? To live during interesting times? ” Yeah, well, here we are, right? And we’re all done with it.
But I don’t see it ending anytime soon - the chaos, the churn, the interesting-ness. In fact, I think there is a lot more going on than just the aggressive breaking down of human systems that have been in place for 50, 100, 200 or more years.
I think we’re witnessing something larger - a cycle of entropy that is greater in scale and scope than our minds can understand - a convergence of cosmic patterns that we can only observe and comprehend on the smallest level. Yes, it’s easy for me to point at these bad actors actively dismantling long-standing institutions and call it something else, when we know they have belligerent and malevolent motivations.
However, I see evidence everywhere I look that we are in a “great unwinding” that impacts everyone and everything around us.
I’m a middle-aged man who takes pretty good care of myself, but sometimes it just feels like no matter what I do I’m fighting inertia and entropy. For all our medical advances, we don’t live forever, and our bodies and minds require constant maintenance just to run at a minimum pace.
We eat healthily in our house, we exercise, don’t drink, and generally live a healthy life. People regularly think I’m younger than I am, though I think that has more to do with being bald than any other single factor, but the fact that we eat mostly whole foods and don’t drink goes a long way.
But still, it’s hard.
Recently my wife injured her leg while exercising and it’s just been a grind for her to get back up and walking again. She’s off to physical therapy and doing all the right things - she’s been very active for years now and had been going to the gym for a long while before injuring herself. But inertia has claimed her now and she has to be so careful just when climbing the stairs.
It’s just the price of being middle-aged, sadly.
What if this sort of breaking down happens at the societal level? What if our human systems (government, economy, society, productivity, etc.) just aren’t meant to survive longer than a century? Or maybe two? Because we as people are ultimately very fragile and break apart easily, at least in the long term, and the effort it takes to hold these things together requires more than, at least now, we have put in place?
It’s just a hypothesis.
Like, yeah, I think there’s something bigger taking place here…
Regardless of your spiritual leanings, we know our little planet is one of billions of billions scattered across a cosmos so vast that we can’t really comprehend it. We know that <gestures broadly> everything is too big for us to understand. We know this to be true.
There are so many questions in the universe that we will never be able to answer, never even understand the question itself, that in moments like these it makes me think that we have hit a deep pocket of entropy – a convergence of forces pulling everything apart no matter how hard we try to keep them together.
My house is 55 years old and beginning to show its age. It is the same age as the house in California that I grew up in, the one my mom left last fall after living there for 48 years. And while both houses are good houses, and obviously important to my life and narrative, the materials and construction used to build them seem to generally have a 50-year-old lifespan.
One of the main reasons we moved my mom out of the house is that she just couldn't keep up with all the maintenance by herself. The deck broke, the garage door stopped working, she couldn’t take down the shades in the backyard, etc. etc. It was the main reason we convinced her to rent a place – she needed to be able to call someone else if something in the house stopped working instead of having to figure it out herself.
We have a similar problem in our house now. We love our house dearly, but two years ago we found out the hard way that the lifespan of a 50-year-old sewer line is… about 50 years. It was a lot of money and effort to replace that line and we’re still dealing with the hole in our yard.
We’ve also had multiple other challenges to our house just this year – at the same time our sewer line backed up, there was a terrible storm that sent a large branch knocking into our roof, denting our gutters. And, as it turns out, punching a hole into our roof so there is now a growing leak that needs to be fixed.
Nothing important – just the roof.
Leaking bathroom sinks, car windows clogging and flooding into the car, pest infestations, and a general sense of “wtf is next?” has pervaded our home. It’s hard to stay optimistic.
And it’s the same feeling I get when I read the news, which I try not to do but the forces of chaos are just too strong and often inject themselves into my life, no matter how hard I try to look away.
I look at the unraveling of these human systems and wonder if it’s not time to replace the roof of our government as well.
It’s really hard not to despair through this. And I am not advocating nihilism or giving up. Quite the contrary.
It feels like we’re hitting an inflection point, a point of no return. But whether things come undone in one large singularity, or just slowly come un-stitched over decades, we can be certain there is no going back from here. Despite what some people have been suckered into believing, there’s no “again” to where we’re heading, only forward, new, and uncharted.
The only tool/superpower we have to fight these agents of chaos and entropy is a belief that we can do better. Call it hope or faith or love or the will to fight another day – use whatever label you need to make right by the universe and lean into today. To give in to these forces and let them chart your course is to give into entropy and the fear it breeds.
We can do better. We know this.
We don’t know how things fit together – there are powers and forces and energies that we can’t perceive let alone understand. But we do know that our human spirit can do better than just giving into the fear. And that is what we’re here for.
That is our great promise.