On Entropy, Stubbornness, and Letting Go

There’s no escaping or avoiding the second law of thermodynamics, so you have to learn to roll with it

There are few things more frustrating in regular, day-to-day life than accidentally destroying one of your prized possessions through carelessness or haste.

For example, a month or so ago, while reaching for my favorite ceramic coffee mug, half-asleep and distracted, I accidently bumped it against the cupboard door while pulling it out, leaving me holding the body of the cup and staring incredulous at the broken shards of the handle littering the countertop. “No problem,” I thought, taking a deep breath. “A rather suboptimal start to the day, but nothing a little superglue can’t fix.”

Fast-forward to last week and I found myself walking from the kitchen carrying my since-repaired mug, this time filled to the brim with freshly brewed café au lait, and the thought crossed my mind, “It sure would suck if that superglue were to fail.”

Call it a premonition, a jinx, or just Murphy’s Law, but not two minutes later, just as I had started a streaming call with my boss and was raising my mug to my lips for my first sip of the day, the handle suddenly snapped, sending hot coffee everywhere — all over me, spattered across my laptop, up the walls (somehow even hitting the ceiling), and pouring like a waterfall over the edge of my desk while a widening puddle deluged various notepads, desk lamps, and everything else within reach. Damn.

Directly into the trash it went — where it should have gone to start with. But more frustrating than the loss of the mug and an end to the pleasure I got in drinking from it, more frustrating even than the huge mess its destruction created, was the fact that my most diligent efforts at reining in entropy only created more. My best attempts at righting a wrong literally exploded in my face.

And that, my friends, is the crux of the issue. That is the unfortunate, inescapable essence of the human condition.

As highly ordered, highly complex creatures, our very existence spews entropy outward into the universe. Every single thing we do to try to bring order to chaos only creates more disorder elsewhere. It’s baked into the laws of physics. There’s no escape, no appeal, no denying it.

So what’s a person to do? Do you live in denial anyway? Do you practice radical acceptance? Do you buy three of everything so you always have a spare? Or is the pragmatic answer a mixture of all of the above?

This never-ending battle against entropy applies to all aspects of life (as would be expected from a universal law). Death itself is nothing other than the final victory of entropy over order. Even the universe will eventually die from “heat death” as all of its matter and energy grows so diffuse that stars can no longer form.

Entropy is so pervasive, it even creeps into relationships (romantic, platonic, or otherwise). For instance, what do you do when your lifelong best friend in the world is a pack-a-day smoker, and has been since you were both rebellious and seemingly invincible at fifteen, but now, even as a grown man and a husband and father of a young child, refuses to quit?

You’ve nagged him about it dozens of times over as many years, to no effect other than to irritate him and threaten lasting damage to the friendship if you don’t drop it. So you do. But what about the love you feel for him as your oldest, dearest companion and confidant and fellow adventurer through space and time? Knowing he’s slowly killing himself, how can you not want to either intervene (which is futile) or distance yourself emotionally as preemptive protection against the inevitable grief that lies ahead? Neither option seems palatable, so it feels an impossible choice.

Yet as bizarre or degrading as it may seem, this situation is really no different than that of the coffee mug. My friend has clearly chosen the path of denial. In his mind, he’s not sabotaging his future health and presence in his son’s adult life. He just really enjoys a smoke. But am I, too, to pretend he doesn’t smoke or that it won’t eventually be the death of him? It’s hard to see how that’s supposed to work.

Then again, perhaps it’s not denial. Perhaps he’s fully made his peace with it. “Someday this will kill me. So be it.” Perhaps I, too, must make my peace with it. Because neither he nor I have the option of redundancy, of stocking up on spare selves or spare, irreplaceable friends. So much for door number three.

I think the answer to this quandary then, is a mixture of acceptance and letting go. You have to accept, to paraphrase Heraclitus from millennia ago, that the only constant in life is change. Even life itself is but a temporary condition. As Lucretius put it, “To none is life given in freehold; to all on lease.”

Nothing lasts forever (not even the universe). Thanks to entropy, even a diamond will eventually degrade into coal. None of your possessions are eternal, and even if you manage to preserve them intact, you can’t take them with you. The deepest of friendships can drift apart, as Hemmingway put it, “gradually, then suddenly.” Likewise with marriages, as the love dies, as emotional distance grows and frigidity sets in.

The only way to get through life then, is to remain nimble, flexible, adaptable. Expect change. Embrace it even. And like the ancient Stoics advised, neither revel gloatingly in good fortune nor despair at misfortune. Everything just is. And so you, too, must simply be. Only then will you find peace and contentment.

But all the same, I’d highly advise keeping some rags handy for soaking up coffee at a moment’s notice — just in case. For whatever you may think of my other suggestions, the continuing functionality of this laptop I’m typing on can attest to that last bit of wisdom at least!

Colby Hess is a freelance writer and photographer from Seattle, and author of the freethinker children’s book The Stranger of Wigglesworth.

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