Entropy: A Quiet Rebellion

One of my new year resolutions was keeping my room tidier. I always fail.

A single sock lay on the floor. My boxing gloves, discarded. Strands of hair barely visible against the carpet. My table was a cacophony of sticky notes, pens, highlighters, and dust. On my bed, a towel and a tub of Vaseline, abandoned in my morning rush. My room was a mess, as it always seemed to be. I must have tidied up a day ago, yet here it was again.

Disorder. Cluttered, chaotic, unrelenting. It felt less like neglect and more like an inevitability. No matter how often I set things in place, disorder returned, creeping back in like an uninvited guest, defying my will.

Left alone, a garden overgrows. A closed room gathers dust. An ungoverned society falls into anarchy. This is entropy. the second law of the universe. Dictating that all systems must tend toward disorder. All systems must tend to equilibrium.

But equilibrium, in this context, isn’t balance but rather surrender. A process where all the energy driving a process in a system becomes evenly dustributed and evenly disordered. It’s the Maggi cube dissolving into soup, the ink bleeding through water, the stars burning out and unavoidably my room being a mess. Disorder isn’t an accident. It is the universe’s default state, the natural conclusion of everything left unattended.

And yet, life resists.

A seed becomes a tree. A cell divides into an organism. A child grows into an adult. How peculiar is it that in a universe whose natural tendency is disorder and decay, life builds, organizes, and restores. Even more interesting that nothing personifies this defiance of natural process more than humanity. We construct cities, compose symphonies, plant gardens in a defiance to universal decree. Our very existence a glaring rebellion. But disorder lurks. Patiently and silently disorder lurks, waiting for a moment of complacency so it might lend its not so obvious hand against our will to order. And when left unchecked our patient opponent wins.

So, I pick up the sock. I return the gloves to their bag. I wipe the dust off the table. These small acts are my rebellion against entropy. They don’t stop the universe from unraveling, but they do make my corner of it a little more orderly, a little more livable.

Because a good life isn’t about winning the battle against disorder. That battle was lost before it began. A good life is choosing to fight it anyway. Day after day, sock after sock.