Less Wasted Energy

Entropy is just what happens when organization isn’t present. Force is what we use when organization hasn’t emerged yet. One is natural. The other is compensatory.

The more organized a system becomes, the less force it requires to hold itself together. Which leads to a strange possibility: the most refined systems can look almost passive from the outside, because they’re spending so little energy fighting themselves.

I think about this mostly as a way to understand the body. The body spends a surprising amount of energy protecting itself — holding tension, bracing, guarding. Preparing for problems that aren’t currently happening. Much of it is invisible to the person doing it; it simply registers as effort, fatigue, or the way things have always felt.

As organization improves, less of that energy goes toward protection. More of it becomes available for what actually matters: movement, recovery, attention, adaptation.