The Top of the Bottom

How 12-step recovery and thermodynamic principles prove the futility of propping up dead and decaying systems.

In yesterday’s post, I wrote about my newfound respect for rest and recovery as it relates to running and achieving personal peak human performance. I also touched on the systemic reasons why rest and recovery are out of reach for the commodified existence of the average global citizen.

Don’t let the numbers fool ya. The democracy of subprime, pre-2007 debt distribution meant there were more over-leveraged debt holders. Today’s debt holding pool is smaller and way more leveraged, helped by a Fed underwriting the issuance of free money to debt markets.

Americans are especially encouraged to spend their stressed-out, tired lives driving through the burbs in search of —or paying for —new fee streams for education, transportation, housing, and medical debt markets. These grim realities might be part reason why 42 percent of Americans are obese and spend three plus hours a day scrolling on their phone (or opting for stronger sedatives) to tolerate life in 2021. 

It doesn’t have to be this bad.

No Mr. Melloncamp, this is America.

Hitting Bottom, aka MaxEnt

In 12-step programs, the addict’s first step is admitting a fundamentally flawed relationship with the addiction in question. One such as myself must admit they can never safely consume alcohol, as evidenced in countless bar-rooms, jail cells, and unsavory late-night situations. One must then admit their lives are “unmanageable”—i.e., they can’t handle their shit anymore. The admission often brings great relief, the addict’s energy freed from propping up the lies, rot, and decay of their lives. This first step provides a gateway for the other eleven, which enable the stepper to understand and address the grimness directly.  

MaxEnt: That which goes up must come down.

Hitting bottom—the point at which the addict realizes they can’t go on —is similar to the principle of maximum entropy (aka MaxEnt). At a certain point, every energetic system —be it a substance-addicted human, a civilization, or a galaxy —reaches a point where it becomes too complex (entropic) to go on. When a system reaches that point, it begins its unstoppable path towards collapse, decay, and death. Peak entropy is the top of the wave, just before that wave folds over and crashes. Waves can be forestalled and buffered, but never eliminated.

Current population and industrial collapse was accurately modeled in a 1972 report called “The Limits of Growth.”

Treated as an energetic system, global industrialized civilization is hitting a MaxEnt event. Reliable modeling for this peak and its subsequent decline—much of which is well underway—have been known since at least 1972.  

One man’s (blue dot) journey to do the things he needs to do. Each trip is increased personal and structural complexity—leading to system decay and death.

Yesterday’s graphic (above) illustrates the mess that is American life—one that is driving complexity, entropy, and personal and planetary systems’ collapse. This new model for human living counters historical ones, where life centered on a contained area with housing, schools, churches, sweat lodges, and other amenities—usually near natural resources like water and arable land. These small, multipurpose settlements simplified resource distribution, maximized protection, and kept life within walking distance. By limiting system’s (settlement) growth and being energetically conservative, these older formations experienced less entropy, and many enjoy long life-cycles. 

Non-rural, pre-industrial and pre-automotive urban planning like this street in Florence feature dense, mixed-use real estate that kept housing within walking distance of life’s requisite amenities like markets, schools, churches, and shops.

Americans flip this. Every home is its own center! Non-home activity is primarily located in dispersed locations within an hour’s drive of one’s home; this activity is housed in single-purpose commercial properties and zones populated by multinational-corporation-owned employment centers and amenities (i.e. office parks and malls).

When the several home-centered lives come together without a center, it becomes a big, entropic mess.

This is the American version of a Florentine Piazza.

This societal entropy has a name: suburbia. The planet has been tossing wildfires, heat-waves, droughts, and economic collapse at them, but America gonna America. 

This is what the entropy looks like on a practical level. Large distances designed to be traversed by cars, dismember American lives: separating homes from the other vital aspects of living, e.g. school, work, etc. These human settlements lack places to meet and recreate.

In coming posts, I will explain how the work-from-home shift presents an opportunity to start counteracting the structural stressors of entropic American life.