[AKN #46] Good things fall apart unless you expend energy
another krappy newsletter #46
Sup homies?
Greetings from SF! I am back home after two weeks of traveling.
In continuing my global march to a return to normalcy, I ended my trip with a weekend in Cabo San Lucas for a bachelor party.
My entire trip was amazing and mentally refreshing, however I forgot how physically exhausting it is to travel for so long and not have an established routine of exercise, eating, sleeping, and executing work.
I went full POS mode the last 2 weeks. I was not very cognizant about what I ate. I drank a lot. I didn’t meditate. I didn’t journal. Full regression to my lesser self.
In the past, I would have descended into a shame spiral about not keeping up with all the good habits that I was so diligent about cultivating, but today I feel good about taking a break.
Retrospectively, this was a great experiment in elimination. I removed the habits that I worked to create over the last few months and I could now test whether or not these things were objectively helping.
Long story short, I will be returning to regular journaling, meditating, eating well, and sleeping well. They all make life better.
For example, without the daily Morning Pages writing routine, I found shipping out the newsletter every Tuesday to be quite a slog. In the last couple weeks, I often found myself locked up and overthinking what I was writing. All things that writing daily helps me overcome.
Obvious finding in retrospect: Not writing on a daily basis makes it harder to produce on a weekly basis.
You discover little insights like this when you run elimination experiments.
On to the newsletter!
LIVE: Good things fall apart unless you expend energy
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that if you leave a system of particles (atoms, molecules, gases, liquids, solids) alone, it will naturally descend into chaos and disorder.
We call this chaos “entropy”. Thus, we say, entropy in the system will tend to increase spontaneously with time.
The prototypical example of this phenomenon is your bedroom. Over time, if not acted upon with work (ie: routine cleaning), it will descend into a mess (ie: your socks, shoes, etc all over the room).
But this dynamic plays out everywhere in our lives.
When left alone, the world becomes disordered
As your phone sits in front of you, it is currently breaking down and degrading. If left alone long enough, it will eventually stop working.
If you become a couch potato, you will descend into an amorphous Flubber state.
Like the musician philosopher Jon Bellion says “good things fall apart.”
Because good things degrade over time due to the omnipresent law that when left alone, things tend towards disorder. That was the original title of the song actually.
You gotta go to work, work, work
The antidote to this descent into chaos is expending energy into the system in the form of “work” to bring the system’s chaos back into some semblance of order.
For example, you might:
Clean your room to maintain the clean look and feel of it.
Take your car for an oil change to maintain its ability to run smoothly.
This work/expenditure of energy is a deliberate act to bring order to the increasing disorder.
Everything is metastable
If everything is naturally predisposed to descend into chaos unless it is worked on, everything you see that is “in order” is actively being worked on.
This is not intuitive.
When you look at something it can appear to be in a very stable state.
For example:
Someone looks like they are in great shape
A room looks pristine
However, all we are seeing is a momentary “metastable” state. Meaning that the existing state of the system that you are looking at is only “apparently stable.”
The only way it maintains this orderly state is through continuous expenditure of energy.
Everything is work in progress
All systems with time will undergo transformation to a more stable state and, due to the second law of thermodynamics, that more stable state is a state of increased disorder.
Therefore, even the most carefully prepared system will degrade over time unless energy is expended to breath order into it.
So remember whenever you are seeing someone or something that amazes or astounds you that what you are looking at only remains that way if it continues to be worked on.
Remove exercise and we become flabby.
Remove meditation and we become an anxious mess.
There is no perfect end state. There are only orderly looking metastable states with work routines that are constantly utilized to fight off the movement towards increased disorder.
In short: when we stop the things that are working, we open the gates and chaos rushes in.
So eat your vegetables and ride your Peloton. Even if you have a six pack.
LAUGH: Oreos or weights?
Images like this bring me a lot of joy. I definitely have to suspend my disbelief that this was not a staged photo, but it is so great that I am OK doing that.
LOVE: Contrarian opinions on digital nomad lifestyles
I tend to agree with the following tweet.
So much pro travel porn out there so I love to see a good contrarian take.
There is so much said about how “enriching” travel is, but I am not so sure we cover the other side of the equation like how much your productivity and health dips when you are thrown out of your routine.
If you are endlessly traveling and never setting up a routine in a single location, I find it hard to believe that you are able to reach your potential in work and health endeavors.
Perhaps I am projecting though. Just cause I can’t do it, does not necessarily mean it cannot be done.
TL;DR - Y’all digital nomad people are wild. I don’t understand how one can travel that much and get actual things done.
Closing time
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own. Who else’s would they be?
K. Rapp