At times, it seems like everything is piling one atop another, faster information, tougher choices, more apps, more login credentials, more systems to do trivial tasks. Even following one topic can be like running round and round in a circle. It used to be you could master numerous skills in one lifetime. It’s now easy to feel like we’re simply incompetent at keeping pace.
But this is not in our heads alone. In the 1800s, scientist Ludwig Boltzmann began to think about how small stuff really tiny particles like atoms acts. He determined that it’s not possible to follow every one of them. There are simply too many of them. He considered the group then instead. He determined that even when each of the tiny parts only follows one basic rule, the entire group begins to do things that are more difficult to manage, more difficult to predict.
He even established a mathematical formula which demonstrated this quite well. Entropy was the term he used. It signifies the way, over time, things drift towards increasing disorder. Not in any wild, chaotic sense, just more distributed, more mixed. Like milk getting slowly mixed into coffee, to the point where it won’t separate anymore. You can’t reverse the swirl and get the milk in the place it was originally.
That’s how time operates.
Things don’t get to go back once they start moving. When you look at it in perspective, entropy involves systems becoming more complicated. There are simply more ways things can be untidy than tidy. And so if life seems like it’s getting out of order, it may be because it is, not in a dysfunctional sense, but in one that is normal. The world contains moving pieces and we are one of them. It doesn’t actually work very well to try to keep every one of them static. Things disperse. Things get tangled. They get intermixed.
