The Speed of Darkness

September always greets me with a mix of relief and mortal dread. Once, it heralded the feverish back-to-school season, where I’d scramble between orientations with the grace of an overcaffeinated octopus trying not to fumble the fresh semester’s syllabi like confetti into the chaos of adolescent academics. Those days are long gone. Now, adult Septembers march into my calendar with an ominous dirge beneath the somber accompaniment of overcast skies, robbing me of any real chance to relax in the cool relief from summer’s heat. On the one hand, there are no more suffocating heat waves, no further desperate attempts to make every sunny day of the manic months last with frantic overbooking of outings, and at last, the six-pack dreams of being beach body ready may be realistically postponed for next year. Instead, the impending gloom of grey weather invites an unsettling thought: nine months already? It’s a realization that marks my year with more foreboding than October’s falling leaves and plastic skeletons, November's somber rains, or December’s icy darkness. It’s as if Charon himself swings by early, offering a pre-pay option for the ferry across the Styx—a grim reminder that time is running out. And what have you done with that time? Can you even recall the resolutions you so proudly penned last December 31st, convinced this would be the year you’d turn it all around? Yet here you are; the side hustle remains unstarted, the trails unhiked, the bookshelf collecting dust next to that instrument you swore you’d learn, and your belly fat continues to ignore its eviction notice.

Entropy— is the measure of thermal energy per unit temperature within a system that refuses to be harnessed for useful work in said system, and occurs when said energy is not applied towards a purpose and left to run about causing trouble. Entropy is our way of describing molecular disorder, which furthermore implies that because energies are constantly seeking vacancy, this game of thermodynamic musical chairs causes their dissipation, leading to decay and chaos. These little losses of energy begin to stack until they erode and deteriorate the systems they were harnessed to work for over varying amounts of time, and thus, everything in the universe is always in the process of falling apart. Observe from a macroscopic perspective and watch as ice cubes melt, milk goes bad, metal rusts, your knees begin to ache with age, the Tupperware cupboard ends up in disarray, and any teenager’s bedroom rapidly devolves into an unkempt disaster worthy of UN intervention. Step back a little further, and you might find that entropy extends its principles beyond academic thermodynamics to other avenues of existence: environments become worn out, cultural fabrics fray, and societal systems, economic, political, and otherwise, buckle under the weight of their own inevitable bloat and collapse.

On a personal level, the entropic nature of time also shifts us to our own doom. Any perceived stasis of life is merely an illusion of the present. If left untended, your physical body wears with age and becomes unhealthy, your mind might dull with complacency, your environments for living and work become burdened with uncleanliness and clutter, your bank account shrinks, and even your social circles fray and disconnect. In ‘Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There’, the sequel to Lewis Carroll’s LSD trip for children entitled ‘Alice's Adventures in Wonderland’, the Red Queen kindly explains to Alice: “My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that”. Canadian psychologist, Dr. Jordan Peterson, uses the quote to further illustrate how entropic effects can be prevalent in our personal lives. In his infamous ‘12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos’, Peterson writes, “To stand still in the world of the Red Queen is to fall behind. If you’re not improving, you’re getting worse. … There’s no maintaining the status quo. You’re either climbing up, or you’re slipping down.”

This personal entropy travels at the speed of darkness, chasing at our heels and consuming the days that slip behind us as we struggle to stay ahead and move forward to cultivate something meaningful. Mathematically abstracted, if our efforts are positively accumulating as we move forward, we might assess: did everything go well today? if so, +1, and you can now be said to move at the speed of 1. But entropy must tax the time with a -1, and now we find ourselves having barely managed to stay in the same space. What’s more, while a day may not go so well and you find yourself with a goose egg 0, entropy persists where you may not, and the week, month, or year may shock you with a negative integer as you find yourself slipping backward. Time’s indefatigable tax man chases us fast enough so that any inaction or stagnancy will allow the nuisance to catch up and get its due. This may manifest in having gained more weight, accumulated more financial debt, being on worse or less connected terms with the people you care about, and perhaps even finding that you’re not as sharp or quick-witted or even happy as you once were. It’s a hard thing to imagine that the forces of the universe are, in that sense, literally against you.

‘So give yourself a break’, is what I wish I could say, but while you certainly shouldn’t beat yourself up, the Red Queen urges us that stopping is the same as moving backward. Not to mention, when the speed of darkness manages to overtake the speed of us, the dark invites disillusionment, and it becomes increasingly difficult to judge what 1 even is. What began as a turn to a fresh page of the calendar has become a meditation on ‘memento mori’, a Latin phrase uttered unto the ears of ancient Roman generals intended to remind them, even amid their triumphs, that ‘remember, you too shall die.’ Well, thanks September, but at least now that we’ve come to understand and take an honest account of the what, we may be better enabled to process the why and develop the how with better clarity of purpose. There has yet to be any discovery of a form of ‘anti-entropy’ in our grasp that can be used to reverse time and de-age our bodies, restore our finances, and rewind our social histories. There is, however, such a thing as ‘negative-entropy’ or ‘negentropy’, pontificated on by physicist Erwin Schrödinger (yes, the one with the cat) in his book ‘What is Life?’ where he points out how if we accept that entropy is the process of disorder, the opposite we strive towards must therefore be: order. Achieving this ‘order’ might seem daunting, but it’s the only way to push back against the inevitable chaos. At this point, however, I will spare you the libraries of works on the topic of what this means and how to go for it. Aside from the texts I already named, I’ve had to resist the urge to regurgitate James Clear’s ‘Atomic Habits’, Viktor Frankl’s ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’, or works like Robert Greene’s “Mastery’, and heaven forbid I ever recommend anything from Oprah’s cauldron of self-help schemes. If all that reading helped take care of the problems, we wouldn’t be here now. Would we, September?

Some previous December, I pondered the same conundrum while on vacation, seated on the sands of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach and watching the entropic display of saltwater waves curl, crash, and dissipate on the shores. In the company of the seagulls, I considered the bright-eyed and optimistic spirit of January 1st, predicated on the beliefs in what life could be, and dreams of how these potentials might play out. I thought about how that personal energy was only bound to suffer its own wane under entropic force before attempting to pass the baton to discipline, which, if uncultivated, would absently remain out to lunch. The mind’s intersection suffers a traffic jam collision of yin-yang ideas, where the pickup trucks of active defiance honking horns of resolute discipline against the elements, crumple the fenders of passive philosophical sedans bumper-stickered with notions of accepting life’s challenges. Would I be able to develop my routines well enough to outpace the speed of darkness? The process of engineering my own personal motor of negentropy to a Formula One standard and keeping ahead long enough to take home some trophies is already a rigorous enough endeavor. There remains the possible falters of wearing out my motivational tires, overworking the mental garage to burnout, and volatile shifts in the weather of life, like the rains of interpersonal difficulties and winds of economic change. The marathon feat of self-improvement asks a lot but also demands balance, and the extremes that we are often motivated towards can easily mislead us to stand against the tides of entropy until its waves batter us into submission or even let ourselves be carried out into the ocean.

A band of locals hoisting boards yelped cheers as they ran to the waters, and I’m certain I’ll not be the first or last to suggest the approach: why not surf? I mean, here we are, standing on Theory Beach next to sardonic armchair philosophers like sunburnt non-surfers suffering analysis paralysis as we contemplate why we aren’t yet in the real world water. We might not have even been intending perfectionism, and yet we once again find ourselves in procrastination, staring down our troubles like Lernean Hydra thrashing about its terrifying heads because we haven’t yet figured out the business of cauterizing stumps after we’ve cleft them. Hercules, in the Roman borrowed Greek myth, got through his problem by leaping to attack the problem, and while there are many a similar (and utterly dissimilar) scenario where caution and care are obviously advised, there will be little or nothing to be careful about if you never get started swinging in the first place. Embrace surfing, run out there with the board so that when the right wave comes along, you’re already out there. Tumble into it with a splash, you almost certainly will, but when you invariably do, you’ll have real data from the real world to use for readjustment, a key element to negentropy itself: experience.

The only way to outrun the speed of darkness is to get momentum, and that’s a run that starts like any other journey, with one foot in front of the other. Before you know it, September has passed by, and so if you’re looking out the window now to see the leaves change color with the onset of October, take this as your sign to simply start living, whatever that means to you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the beach.