28/10/2025
I can’t put my finger on it, but something about it seems off… 🤪 Gosh, it’s been so many little things lately! The walk seems to eat everything! But really it’s all just a little twist on the dial of entropy; entropy swallows all. 🫦
Familiar with the concept? When physicists talk about entropy, they’re describing a fundamental law of the universe: the ever constant flow of order to disorder, solution to dissolution, and the reason creamer disperses into your coffee and wont go back to it’s original state—at least, not without some super sciencey manipulation. It isn’t a force like gravity or electromagnetism, but it’s a key ingredient to the composition of our universe.
Energy disperses, patterns unravel or transform, and heat transfers until everything reaches equilibrium. The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that in a closed system, disorder always increases. Every organized structure—from galaxies to cell membranes to the sign I just crunched—exists temporarily, shedding layers of order until the balance tips back toward chaos.
It’s humbling to realize that this principle doesn’t just govern physical matter but underlies everything. Stars collapse, mountains erode, civilizations rise and fall, memories fade. Even consciousness itself—our momentary arrangement of neurons—is a fleeting pattern, perpetually moving toward dissolution. Entropy is not destruction for destruction’s sake; it is the universe’s way of maintaining balance through change.
Imagine if we didn’t burn off anything and grew exponentially from everything we consumed, never dying. That’s essentially a world without entropy. And that world is quickly gobbled up by the most consumptive element or entity… kind of! I mean… it’s paradoxical any way you split it. Life and matter as we know them don’t seem to be able to exist in the absence of entropy.
What we call decay is necessary transformation. Ancient thinkers recognized this truth long before thermodynamics gave it a name. The Taoists captured it in the symbol of yin and yang—two interdependent forces, underpinning the whole of creation. Each contains the seed of the other. One is integrative and generative. The other, yielding to dissolution. Death gives way to life; the pieces of destruction are used to construct, e.g. trees ➡️ houses, etc.
In Hindu cosmology, the cycle of creation (Brahma), preservation (Vishnu), and destruction (Shiva) mirrors the same flow of thermodynamics: the universe forever assembling and disassembling itself.
This duality—order and chaos, growth and decay—we resist as “a problem” we think can be solved, when it’s instead a reality to be celebrated. Our discomfort with impermanence comes from wanting one half of the dance without the other. We worship birth but resist death, seek clarity but flee uncertainty, cling to stability while demanding progress. When, without tension between opposites, the universe would have no motion at all. The “eternal wrestling” between order and disorder is the very mechanism by which reality sustains itself. We should be grateful for it!
The Stoics could be seen as pointing us to these same realities: always working to appreciate things as they are rather than hoping they should conform to our little impermanent will, always aiming to align themselves with the “universal nature” of things rather than accept the ramblings of desire, and even memento mori—“remember that you will die,”—using the results of entropy to live life to the fullest.
But perhaps we should take it one step further: memento entropia. 😉Remember that everything decays—not only the body but every possession, every thought, every structure, every impression of self and world. What we call “reality” is a temporary pattern in flux, and even the subjective lens through which we perceive it is dissolving as we speak.
And if there exists any universe beyond this one, such that we could perceive—some alternate plane or realm beyond our current comprehension—entropy, in whatever form it takes there, would surely remain. After all, what would experience be without transformation? How could time be perceived in the absence of change?
For the sake of survival, certain forms of resistance are necessary. But for the sake of thriving, acceptance is a learned necessity. When we stop resisting entropy—and change for that matter—we start participating in it consciously. We become collaborators with impermanence rather than “victims” of it. That is to say: with 100 useless bits of hotel art, you can create a million dollar sculpture that shakes the art industry.
So, no. My broken sign isn’t a tragedy or even a loss—although I won’t be making any art out of it. It’s just another reminder that everything—energy condensing into matter, matter forming stars, stars forging elements, elements giving rise to worlds, worlds to life, life to perception, perception to conception, conceptual to material and back again—everything owes its existence to the very same principle that ensures its eventual disappearance; hate it or love it.
Let’s love it.
Links to donate at walkingamericacouple.com ❤️
