Beware of Entropy, the Great Time Thief
Entropy is a fact of Reality — the tendency of things to chaotically move about and bounce off one another and fly apart. Life, on the other hand, is sort of Extropic in nature and tends to organize (organism) and put things neatly in place. These two forces are at constant odds with each other, often in the service of life. As the bees make their perfect honeycomb, the bear seeks to rip it apart and eat the honey. In a sense, the bear has stolen the time from the bees that they took to construct the honeycomb. And time tastes good, as any wine connoisseur will tell you.
And humans are no different, indeed much worse. We regularly steal time from each other and we do it all day, every day, often in meaningless ways having little to do with survival. Modern life has only accelerated and amplified what was once a natural survival tendency and put it into our lives in ways that have no intrinsic value. A perfect example of this is spam emails or phone calls. Every time you take action to look at your phone or delete incoming spam messages, you have used up some of your finite Time Resource. Or rather, it has been stolen from you. This crime is so egregious and taken on a whole, it costs humanity centuries of man-hours of lost time. Once one understands the value of time, then one must conclude that spammers are to be punished severely until they no longer exist. However, achieving that through punishment is not nearly as perfect as through obsolescence. It is up to you to be aware of when your time is being stolen and when entropy has been hurled your way. One can become attuned to the many micro-ripoffs of time that eat away at your life energy and in so doing, can better combat it and keep one’s life more organized.
Entropy can be commercialized. We are bombarded with advertisements throughout our lives, consuming years of time on things you will never buy and certainly don’t need. Even in less nefarious ways, entropy plagues us in nickel and dime ways. Every time your computer or phone asks you if you are ready to update or, God forbid, you actually decide yes, it’s time to update, a smaller or larger slice of your time on Earth will go poof! And this can quickly cascade into a whole series or further updates of no longer compatible software, drivers, etc., or even worse, be a poor update that degrades the performance of your device, stealing even more future time from you, all in the friendly guise of progress. Wasting your precious time hassling with computers, appliances, cars, corporate bureaucracy, etc. is you battling commercialized entropy. Not all such things are intentional because companies are also victims of entropy such as when operating systems become too large to understand and fully debug. Each person that makes up a company adds a random factor to the mix which taken altogether creates an impossible task of fully organizing.
Governments can be the biggest Entropic villains, wasting billions or trillions of dollars worth of labor and materials — and time. One poor decision can lead to a monumental cascade of wasted effort. Great examples of this can be found in the building of large walls such as the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall and possibly a large, Nature-killing proposed wall on the US Southern border—all equally destined for obsolescence. Government entropy so well entrenched and documented that we have come to expect utter inefficiency and waste. So much our our work-year is put into taxes and so much of that money is wasted for absolutely no benefit to society that we are literally giving months per year of our one and only known life and letting government flush that time down the toilet! Every year. Added all together, expect numerous years of your life to be flushed over your life span.
Not only can entropy be weaponized, it often is the weapon itself. What is a bomb but a tool to scramble up organized matter into chaos or a gun to scramble up the insides of a body? Too much entropy is not a good thing for life. On a more subtle level, entropy can also be used to scramble up society. When you look at the results of social media tampering to sow and amplify divides among the populus, what you are witnessing is a “stirring of the pot.” Creating false narratives not only wastes people’s time but causes them to then bounce into others, wasting their time as well. The perpetrator however is like the bear with the bees and getting what is desired—a defeated opponent.
One of the many positive outcomes of a future automated and AI-managed Materially Satisfied world, is there would be no need to fish for dollars or suckers because we’d already have everything we need efficiently delivered and would have much better uses of our time. Of course well before that, AI may learn to squash spam (it already can) before it ever reaches you, no matter how cleverly disguised it is. But make no mistake, Entropy will eventually disintegrate you and scatter your ashes to the wind, so don’t get too attached to your physical body or those of your loved ones.
A self-maintaining Auxonic System (where robots maintain and build other robots) is the ultimate extropic fighter in the war against Entropy. But entropy is not a foe that can ever be fully defeated since it is built into the fabric of space-time and is needed for life and even matter to operate normally. We are always one supernova or asteroid or pandemic away from the Great Destroyer.
“I am time, the destroyer of all; I have come to consume the world.” ~ Krishna
Time Used As Punishment
Prison is a construct we have created to actively erase/remove time from an individual’s life, or more precisely, the freedom of how to spend that time. We often say “doing time” with regards to prison. This illustrates that we very much value time and that to take it away is one of our harshest punishments. The Death Penalty is our way of taking away all Earthly time for an individual.
You don’t do time. Time does you.
Superior prison systems seek not to destroy and waste the inmate’s time but rather to utilize it to rehabilitate, educate and foster a better chance that the prisoner will emerge as a more prepared citizen and not return to the offending behavior. This is an Extropic approach rather than Entropic, seeking to “organize” the prisoner’s time for the greater good of society. The time will pass regardless. How one uses it is all that matters.
But you don’t have to be sent to prison in order for “the system” to steal some of your time. Every time you wait at a stop light when there is no traffic, a little bit of you goes into the void. Commuting and work itself is a theft of time to greater or lesser degree, depending on how lucky you are. For many, work is another kinder form of prison. Anyone who has worked at a company that requires one to use a punch-clock upon arrival and leaving and administrative “punishment” that results from even the slightest unexplained tardiness understands this feeling. Fortunately, we can use that commuting time to increase our mental and spiritual abundance if we choose to so it need not be time completely wasted. After all, the same time will pass no matter what you are doing so make the most of it.
Structured time at work, at school, doing chores and playing the game of life, even while incarcerated can be rewarding but it’s truly up to us to make the most of it, especially when it’s required of us and we have no choice.
Take Control of Your Time
As said, we will never vanquish Entropy as a force of Nature, nor should we even attempt because it’s the very thing that makes life interesting and creates change. However, it behooves us to become aware of “time leaks” that are foisted upon us so that we might develop some protections. Whenever possible, guard your valuable time and seek ways to spend it according to your own will and desires and don’t be a sucker to the entropic time thieves that abound, greedily harvesting parts of your life to fulfill their desires.
Organization is the absolute best antidote to entropy. The more organized you are in your thoughts and your activities, the more time you will free up to do the things you love and over a lifetime you may even recover some of those lost years that were stolen from you.
Based on an excerpt from my book: Wealth and the End of Money
