Me Against Entropy
*last updated on April 2, 2026
I am curious about how other people live, and I enjoy visiting other people’s homes. But those visits can also make me think about my own house and how it looks. I notice these thoughts even more when someone comes into my space. In both situations, I can become self-conscious about what my home might seem to say about me.
My home is livable, functional, and safe. It works for my family. But it is not especially polished. Some things are worn. Some things need fixing. Some things are arranged more for use than for appearance.
This is not simply neglect. It reflects my priorities, my limits, and the fact that keeping a household going always involves choices. I care about hygiene. I care that things function. I care that the space supports daily life. But making everything look beautiful or fully put together is not where I choose to put most of my time, money, or energy.
Even so, I would be dishonest if I said I felt completely free about that. When I am in other people’s homes, or when they are in mine, I can start seeing my space through imagined outside eyes: what looks old, what looks shabby, what might seem like a sign that I am not managing life properly. Even when I know that the space is serving its purpose, that feeling can still appear.
I am curious about how other people live, and I enjoy visiting other people’s homes. But those visits can also make me think about my own house and how it looks. I notice these thoughts even more when someone comes into my space. In both situations, I can become self-conscious about what my home might seem to say about me.
My home is livable, functional, and safe. It works for my family. But it is not especially polished. Some things are worn. Some things need fixing. Some things are arranged more for use than for appearance.
This is not simply neglect. It reflects my priorities, my limits, and the fact that keeping a household going always involves choices. I care about hygiene. I care that things function. I care that the space supports daily life. But making everything look beautiful or fully put together is not where I choose to put most of my time, money, or energy.
Even so, I would be dishonest if I said I felt completely free about that. When I am in other people’s homes, or when they are in mine, I can start seeing my space through imagined outside eyes: what looks old, what looks shabby, what might seem like a sign that I am not managing life properly. Even when I know that the space is serving its purpose, that feeling can still appear.
My life and my scholarship are deeply connected. I do not experience things in life and then leave them outside my writing. I work through them by writing. I use them to ask questions. And because I have spent so long exploring power and powerlessness as intertwined, I found myself thinking about this ordinary domestic issue in those terms too.
Human beings do have power to create local order. We clean, repair, organize, replace, coordinate, and maintain. We make spaces workable. We keep things going. But that power is never complete. It exists alongside a very basic powerlessness. Things do not stay in the condition we want by themselves. They wear out. They break down. They get dirty. They drift. They require attention again and again.
That ordinary experience of trying to hold things together is what led me to think in terms of entropy. Not because I want to turn everyday life into a physics lesson, but because “entropy” offers a useful analogy for something many of us already know in a practical way: maintenance never ends. If you stop doing it, things change. They do not remain suspended in the state you prefer. Order, at least human order, has to be continually produced and reproduced.
I think this is one reason the pressure of order can feel so intense. It is not just that there is work to do. It is that the work never really ends. There is no final moment when everything is fully secured. There is no permanent victory. You clean, and it gets dirty again. You fix something, and something else starts to wear down. You organize a room, and daily life immediately begins undoing the arrangement.
Having thought about it for a while, I noticed that this pressure comes from more than one place. Some of it is biological and practical. We really do need certain forms of local order to stay healthy and to function. Bodies need care. Homes need upkeep. Food needs to be stored safely. Dirt, mold, and serious disrepair can become real problems. None of that is imaginary.
But some of the pressure is social and cultural. It is one thing to maintain what is necessary for health and function. It is another to feel that your house must also look a certain way, signal a certain kind of competence, or meet a standard of presentation that is not strictly about living but about social legibility. A room can function perfectly well and still make someone feel ashamed. A building can be safe and usable and still look, in socially recognizable terms, as though one is falling behind.
I think many of us experience these two kinds of pressure without clearly separating them. We experience them all as necessity. And because that pressure is real, the standards themselves can begin to feel self-evident. It becomes difficult to pause and ask: What exactly is required here, and by whom? What kind of order am I trying to maintain? What part of this is about life, and what part is about judgment?
From there, another question follows: Whose order is this?
When we call something orderly or disorderly, we are speaking from a human point of view, and really from a specific human point of view shaped by needs, habits, social expectations, and lived experience. The kinds of order we try to maintain in our homes, our bodies, and our social worlds are not the order of the universe. They are not neutral standards written into reality. They are local human arrangements, shaped partly by what supports life and functioning, and partly by cultural norms about what a proper life should look like.
Remembering that can change how we see the issue. It reminds us that what feels obvious is not always universal. It also reminds us that the larger world is not organized around protecting the forms of order we depend on. Human order is local, fragile, and contingent. It matters deeply to us, but it is still only one kind of order.
And then there is a further complication. The effort to maintain human order is not cost-free. This is something I have been thinking about with some hesitation, because I do not want to turn the essay into an accusation. I am not interested in blaming people for cleaning their homes, replacing broken things, wanting comfort, or trying to make life manageable. I understand those impulses. I live inside them too.
Still, I do think it matters to notice that local human order often depends on material and environmental costs that are carried elsewhere in a product’s or practice’s life cycle. Cleanliness uses water, chemicals, packaging, and energy. Repair and renovation generate waste. Consumer goods and practices that make one place feel more stable or beautiful (in the eye of the beholder) often rely on extraction, production, transport, and disposal systems that remain largely invisible at the point of use. Very often, what looks like order here involves disorder somewhere else, or at least burdens that have been moved out of sight.
I think one thing that makes this difficult to talk about is that people are already under so much pressure. Many people probably feel far more pressure around order than I do. For some, maintaining a certain level of neatness, repair, presentation, and domestic control is tied to dignity, self-respect, social acceptance, or simple emotional survival. I do not want to dismiss that. I do not want to speak as though those investments are shallow or foolish. They are often responses to real forms of constraint.
In that sense, if I am less driven by order than some people are, that may not make me more enlightened. It may simply mean that I experience the pressure differently, or less intensely, or that I have made a somewhat uneasy peace with a level of visible wear and imperfection that others would find much harder to tolerate. Even then, the anxiety has not disappeared. It is still there, just not always in control.
What I want, then, is not to criticize people for trying to maintain order. It is to make that effort more visible as a condition of life rather than as a simple personal choice or moral measure. We are all, in different ways, dealing with the fact that our lives require ongoing maintenance. We are all negotiating the overlap between what is biologically necessary, what is socially demanded, and what is materially and ecologically costly. We are all trying to create pockets of livability inside conditions we did not choose.
That does not make all standards meaningless. It does not mean order is fake. It means order is complicated. I live in an ongoing negotiation with entropy. So does everyone else. The difference is only in how much pressure we feel, how many resources we have, what standards we have internalized, and what kinds of disorder we can afford to tolerate.
What I want to hold on to is this: human beings really do need local forms of order. We should be able to talk more openly, without shame or blame, about the strain of maintaining this order, the assumptions hidden inside it, and the costs that are often shifted elsewhere in the process. We should be able to admit that much of what we call ordinary life is a constant effort to hold things together, materially, socially, and emotionally, for a little while. And I hope we can find the courage to ask ourselves which pressures truly need answering and which ones we may be allowed to let go of.
Human beings do have power to create local order. We clean, repair, organize, replace, coordinate, and maintain. We make spaces workable. We keep things going. But that power is never complete. It exists alongside a very basic powerlessness. Things do not stay in the condition we want by themselves. They wear out. They break down. They get dirty. They drift. They require attention again and again.
That ordinary experience of trying to hold things together is what led me to think in terms of entropy. Not because I want to turn everyday life into a physics lesson, but because “entropy” offers a useful analogy for something many of us already know in a practical way: maintenance never ends. If you stop doing it, things change. They do not remain suspended in the state you prefer. Order, at least human order, has to be continually produced and reproduced.
I think this is one reason the pressure of order can feel so intense. It is not just that there is work to do. It is that the work never really ends. There is no final moment when everything is fully secured. There is no permanent victory. You clean, and it gets dirty again. You fix something, and something else starts to wear down. You organize a room, and daily life immediately begins undoing the arrangement.
Having thought about it for a while, I noticed that this pressure comes from more than one place. Some of it is biological and practical. We really do need certain forms of local order to stay healthy and to function. Bodies need care. Homes need upkeep. Food needs to be stored safely. Dirt, mold, and serious disrepair can become real problems. None of that is imaginary.
But some of the pressure is social and cultural. It is one thing to maintain what is necessary for health and function. It is another to feel that your house must also look a certain way, signal a certain kind of competence, or meet a standard of presentation that is not strictly about living but about social legibility. A room can function perfectly well and still make someone feel ashamed. A building can be safe and usable and still look, in socially recognizable terms, as though one is falling behind.
I think many of us experience these two kinds of pressure without clearly separating them. We experience them all as necessity. And because that pressure is real, the standards themselves can begin to feel self-evident. It becomes difficult to pause and ask: What exactly is required here, and by whom? What kind of order am I trying to maintain? What part of this is about life, and what part is about judgment?
From there, another question follows: Whose order is this?
When we call something orderly or disorderly, we are speaking from a human point of view, and really from a specific human point of view shaped by needs, habits, social expectations, and lived experience. The kinds of order we try to maintain in our homes, our bodies, and our social worlds are not the order of the universe. They are not neutral standards written into reality. They are local human arrangements, shaped partly by what supports life and functioning, and partly by cultural norms about what a proper life should look like.
Remembering that can change how we see the issue. It reminds us that what feels obvious is not always universal. It also reminds us that the larger world is not organized around protecting the forms of order we depend on. Human order is local, fragile, and contingent. It matters deeply to us, but it is still only one kind of order.
And then there is a further complication. The effort to maintain human order is not cost-free. This is something I have been thinking about with some hesitation, because I do not want to turn the essay into an accusation. I am not interested in blaming people for cleaning their homes, replacing broken things, wanting comfort, or trying to make life manageable. I understand those impulses. I live inside them too.
Still, I do think it matters to notice that local human order often depends on material and environmental costs that are carried elsewhere in a product’s or practice’s life cycle. Cleanliness uses water, chemicals, packaging, and energy. Repair and renovation generate waste. Consumer goods and practices that make one place feel more stable or beautiful (in the eye of the beholder) often rely on extraction, production, transport, and disposal systems that remain largely invisible at the point of use. Very often, what looks like order here involves disorder somewhere else, or at least burdens that have been moved out of sight.
I think one thing that makes this difficult to talk about is that people are already under so much pressure. Many people probably feel far more pressure around order than I do. For some, maintaining a certain level of neatness, repair, presentation, and domestic control is tied to dignity, self-respect, social acceptance, or simple emotional survival. I do not want to dismiss that. I do not want to speak as though those investments are shallow or foolish. They are often responses to real forms of constraint.
In that sense, if I am less driven by order than some people are, that may not make me more enlightened. It may simply mean that I experience the pressure differently, or less intensely, or that I have made a somewhat uneasy peace with a level of visible wear and imperfection that others would find much harder to tolerate. Even then, the anxiety has not disappeared. It is still there, just not always in control.
What I want, then, is not to criticize people for trying to maintain order. It is to make that effort more visible as a condition of life rather than as a simple personal choice or moral measure. We are all, in different ways, dealing with the fact that our lives require ongoing maintenance. We are all negotiating the overlap between what is biologically necessary, what is socially demanded, and what is materially and ecologically costly. We are all trying to create pockets of livability inside conditions we did not choose.
That does not make all standards meaningless. It does not mean order is fake. It means order is complicated. I live in an ongoing negotiation with entropy. So does everyone else. The difference is only in how much pressure we feel, how many resources we have, what standards we have internalized, and what kinds of disorder we can afford to tolerate.
What I want to hold on to is this: human beings really do need local forms of order. We should be able to talk more openly, without shame or blame, about the strain of maintaining this order, the assumptions hidden inside it, and the costs that are often shifted elsewhere in the process. We should be able to admit that much of what we call ordinary life is a constant effort to hold things together, materially, socially, and emotionally, for a little while. And I hope we can find the courage to ask ourselves which pressures truly need answering and which ones we may be allowed to let go of.