An essay on why things don’t remain static, the arms race with entropy and order as the bearer of the meaning of life.
Things Never Remain Static
Let’s say you move into a new home after all the running around to sort out the legal aspects, arranging the finances and ensuring the house is in good condition. You hope to take it a bit easy for some time, before picking up the next task life throws at you.
How often did this work out?
Experience suggests that your hope of taking a breather rarely works out. No sooner than you achieve a goal, it is replaced by the next one in a never-ending spiral.
The Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland says: “You have to keep running to stay in the same place.“
There is no standing still – things improve, or they get worse.
A few more examples:
- A new house has teething issues, but after addressing them, you need to pay attention to plumbing, electrical fittings, cracks that deteriorate and require repairs.
- Tidy rooms become dusty even when you don’t use them.
- Relationships become weak when you don’t spend time on them.
- Muscles and skills are lost when you don’t use them.
- A business stagnates when you reduce the attention and energy you devote to keep it growing and profitable.
- An organization becomes complacent once the leadership stops expending energy to drive change on an ongoing basis.
Nelson Mandela put it beautifully
I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made missteps along the way.
But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.
I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can only rest for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not ended.
Why do things deteriorate instead of remaining stable, without change, after you have achieved a goal?
Entropy: The Agent of Disorder
Entropy is the tendency of things to move to disorder.
Why?
Things can be ordered in a limited number of ways, but disorder has more possibilities.
For example, a car exists in only a particular arrangement of atoms, but atoms that make up the car can exist in an infinite number of combinations, most of the combinations meaningless to us.
Second Law of Thermodynamics
The second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time, and is constant if and only if all processes are reversible. Isolated systems spontaneously evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium, the state with maximum entropy.
Jeremy Rifkin explains in this in plain English:
Time goes forward because energy itself is always moving from an available to an unavailable state.
Our consciousness is continually recording the entropy change in the world around us. We watch our friends get old and die. We sit next to a fire and watch it’s red-hot embers turn slowly into cold white ashes.
We experience the world always changing around us, and that experience is the unfolding of the second law.
It is the irreversible process of dissipation of energy in the world.
Entropy Creates the Arrow of Time
A smooth face grows wrinkled with time.
Keep a car idle for a few years, and its condition will gradually deteriorate.
One needs to spend energy to maintain the vehicle in good running order and fight the battle with entropy.
The increase of disorder or entropy is what distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.
– Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
Life is an Arms Race with Entropy
Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.
– Václav Havel
Life participates in the arms race with entropy in two ways:
1. Order Arises from Expending Energy
Action and expenditure of energy are essential to keep things in order.
- Individuals invest time and energy to build new skills, seek better-paying jobs or starting new businesses to get a better return on their time invested.
- Businesses invest time and money to minimize the entropy of their staff’s skills and performance through training, performance reviews and quality checks.
- A car and elevators go through regular preventive maintenance to keep them in working order. Ignoring a problem makes it gradually worse. A stitch in time saves nine.
Without constant maintenance individuals and societies tend toward chaos.
2. Change is Sowing Disorder to Create Order
All forms of change take us from one state of order to another.
We can view change as deliberately inducing disorder in the current state to achieve a new and a more efficient state of order.
For example:
- Organizational changes and restructuring keep staff on their toes and wide awake to new developments.
- Mergers and takeovers are a form of change to constantly keep winning in the marketplace.
- Innovation creates new products to replace old ones and thereby creates its disruption.
Change makes entropy an ally. Temporarily.
Once the change is achieved, we switch back to #1 – expending energy to preserve this changed state of order.
Order Bears the Meaning of Life
Everything that comes together falls apart. Everything.
The chair I’m sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart.
I’m going to fall apart, probably before this chair. And you’re going to fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you—they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart.
The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases.
Things fall apart.
– John Green, Looking for Alaska
Things fall apart. Everything exists temporarily before it eventually vanishes into nothingness.
Life is this fleeting victory over entropy.
Entropy makes us value this brief life and find meaning in our existence.
Creating this island of order, for a brief period of time, through our energy in the sea of disorder, is perhaps the true meaning of existence.
This warm home, smiling faces, a hot cup of coffee, a bed to sleep peacefully, and a chair to read are all bearers of the meaning of life.
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Rightly said, Everything exists temporarily before it eventually vanishes into nothingness. CHANGE IS PERMANENT.
And, fact is … Many people will choose to die before they will choose to change 😊🙄