He Not Busy Being Born is Busy Dying

“He not busy being born is busy dying” - Bob Dylan

In his final shareholder letter as the CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos wrote, “If living things don’t work actively to prevent it, they eventually merge into their surroundings, and cease to exist as autonomous beings. The world pulls at you in an attempt to make you normal. You must work to maintain your distinctiveness… The world wants you to be typical—in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen”

The universe has a default. It brings things back to chaos.

It’s why dead animals decompose and mountains erode.

It’s also why your room gets dirty if you don’t clean it for a week, or why you have to fold your laundry.

It takes energy to resist the default and build something worthwhile and orderly.

• Relationships drift apart without attention.
• Skills atrophy without practice.
• Group projects become dysfunctional without structure and maintenance.

This is the second law of thermodynamics: the entropy of an isolated system will always stay the same or increase. 

If the universe is automatically going towards a disorder, then how were living things, like us, created?

The key in the definition is isolated system.

Earth is different because simple self-replicating molecules that capture and use energy have a survival advantage.

Over billions of years, natural selection favored new, sophisticated ways of harvesting the sun’s energy, which led to the complex biological machinery we see today. 

The sun’s energy.

For life, the sun’s energy is what it takes to resist the default.

The universe overall is still increasing in entropy, but Earth, in the context of life, isn’t.

Just like Earth needs the sun’s energy to sustain complex life, you too need constant energy inputs to avoid becoming average.

This is not only just high-quality nutrition, but also

• high-quality information: books, conversations with accomplished people
• mental stimulation: challenging experiences
• exercise
• sleep

Most people operate on low-quality inputs such as mindless scrolling, gossip, processed thoughts from others without their own input, because that is the default.

They stop learning, they surround themselves with similar thinkers (an echo chamber) avoid discomfort, do the same things, and think the same things every day.

At some points, their skills atrophy, their curiosity dies, and their relationships stagnate.

Just like a world without the input of a kind and powerful sun, everything slowly deteriorates and starts to smooth itself into its surroundings. 

Increasing entropy isn’t destruction.

It isn’t immediately complete chaos. It is just diffusion: apathy, or mediocrity.

That’s why it’s hard to notice. It’s a slow process that takes years.

In fact, just like you don’t notice yourself getting thinner or fatter, you never notice it until it’s already there.

The universe’s default is mediocrity.

It applies to a large scale too: ordered society and democracy is not the norm.

The norm is tyranny and dictatorship.

It’s still order, not anarchy, but a very mediocre kind.

In fact, the reason why tyranny can come into place isn’t because of deliberate evil: it’s because of stupidity.

Even if people do not deliberately mean to harm others, they become silent helpers of injustice through obedience and conformity.

Albert Einstein once said, “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.”

While evil knows it is doing wrong and often hides behind lies, stupidity believes it is doing good and feels proud of its blindness.

People who cannot think clearly allow injustice to grow and spread.

When people stop questioning, they become tools that others can use.

They believe whatever they are told and reject facts that make them uncomfortable, and defend falsehoods as if they were sacred truths.

This is also the concept of groupthink.

People would rather conform and be accepted by the crowd, by their group, than be right on their own because being right on your own is revolutionary: it is not the universe’s default.

Social media keeps us trapped inside worlds that only reflect what we already believe.

We repeat slogans that we’ve already heard instead of seeking the truth. A lie told often enough becomes the truth.

A mediocre person obeys without question, believes without evidence, and attacks anyone who challenges their beliefs.

Freedom only begins when we think honestly, question assumptions, and seek the truth even if it isolates us.

This has been the case across all generations and throughout human history.

Have the courage to resist entropy. 

To love your neighbor is in the Ten Commandments because it is not something people normally do. You need to be reminded to put active energy into doing that. 

Life Bezos said, to be yourself is not the norm. Falling into conformity is the norm.

It takes deliberate energy to be yourself. It isn’t easy.

There also isn’t an alternative, because differentiation is survival.

Homeostasis: we need to maintain our own internal temperatures, water content, acidity, which is occasionally drastically different from the surrounding.

The alternative is death, which, in practice, looks like mediocrity.

He not busy being born is busy dying.

-Armaan