I like to look at it through a thermodynamic lens, simply because it ties perfectly together with how everything works. Let me explain: every living thing breathes. Look at the earth and its atmosphere; the rotation around its axis cools down the atmosphere in a breathlike manner. It ensures that parts of it always cool down and heat up such that air can circulate. Every living thing on earth follows the same pattern in some shape or form. And so do our societies. They breathe; exhale and inhale.

During inhales, societies are compressed and more in a state where building skills of various sorts are more important. This shift can already be seen in the way America is attempting to regain its manufacturing base. Another one is the military build-up taking place around the western hemisphere. Just recently, I was at an event where the Swedish officer Passikivi complained about the middle management that acts as a drag on the system. The compression can also be seen in the way globalization is reverting. Tariffs imposed, money supply tightened, tourism declining. I also define this period as a more linear one, where things become more predictable and close to physical reality.

Exhales are the periods that we are just about to leave. It’s when the fundamentals are so strong that coordination is where the value is to be harvested. It’s a period that produces not engineers but rather economists, lawyers and so on. It’s the less linear one, where things become less predictable and more abstract and where globalization flourishes. The late stages are what some people define as decadence. The late stage is precisely where we are now.

We are currently in a transition period between exhale and inhale, which is what Turchin calls a boom-bust cycle. The shift creates friction and that heat is the conflicts we are seeing around the world. During inhale periods, reality is compressed and societies start living closer to fundamentals: real materials, energy supplies, linear relationships. The conservatism is not random; it’s precisely what happens during these periods.

The even more interesting part is that “The Emperor’s New Clothes” was written in 1837, during Denmark’s own transition from the late flourishing of its Golden Age toward the upheavals that would culminate in the revolutions of 1848 and the loss of Schleswig-Holstein. Andersen wrote the story at a moment when Danish society was still wrapped in the comfort of cultural achievement and royal prestige, but the cracks were already forming. The aristocracy performed confidence while the foundations were shifting beneath them. A child calling out the obvious truth was not just a fairy tale; it was a diagnosis of a society that had lost the ability to say what was real.

Turchin actually noticed that as time progressed, societies shifted away more and more from wars to competition. So basically, the transition periods create friction that the underlying geometry of our societies is able to channel more efficiently over time. It’s actually remarkable to witness and on one hand terrifying for what it can bring to the world, but on the other hand comforting that it’s most likely not going to be as bad as previous cycles.

And what would this all be for if I didn’t try to predict what will happen next.

Contrary to what people have said about population decline, I actually think we will see a reversal in that pattern and start seeing an uptick. In a linear world, relationships will be easier to form, which in turn should lead to more babies.

This is not investment advice, but I think stocks like oil and infrastructure will outperform tech moving forward for years to come. AI in particular will see a major reversal, partly due to the overhyped LLM cycle but also the de facto energy constraints as well as the reallocation of resources to sectors that societies truly need. If anything, Iran showed us that you don’t need much AI to win decisive battles and potentially wars. But this doesn’t mean no AI; it just means a stop to this insane capital allocation in one single sector with the hope that AGI is soon going to take over the world anyway.

And probably the most obvious one, is that US hegemony is de facto over and we’ll witness a new world order taking shape: The gift Trump is talking about does not exist.

Today marks another such moment. Not a wall falling. Not a flag being lowered. A social media post.

“Many Countries, especially those who are affected by Iran’s attempted closure of the Hormuz Strait, will be sending War Ships, in conjunction with the United States of America, to keep the Strait open and safe. We have already destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military capability, but it’s easy for them to send a drone or two, drop a mine, or deliver a close range missile somewhere along, or in, this Waterway, no matter how badly defeated they are. Hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others, that are affected by this artificial constraint, will send Ships to the area so that the Hormuz Strait will no longer be a threat by a Nation that has been totally decapitated. In the meantime, the United States will be bombing the hell out of the shoreline, and continually shooting Iranian Boats and Ships out of the water. One way or the other, we will soon get the Hormuz Strait OPEN, SAFE, and FREE!”

• Donald J. Trump, March 14, 2026

If you kept reading it over and over, you weren’t the only one. I’m fairly confident this one will go in the history books as the very moment when American hegemony broke. Not with a military defeat but, ironically, a social media post.

Yes, the US still has the largest navy. The dollar still dominates trade. The economy is still enormous. But hegemony was never about size, it was about the guarantee and the guarantee just asked China for help.

There are so many things to pick apart I barely know where to start. The contradictions, the tone, the simultaneous claim of total victory and admission of continued threat. But one thing strikes harder than everything else: the call for help. Among those called upon, no other than China itself.

And indeed, because of Trump’s erratic posts about everything and nothing, back and forth, it wouldn’t surprise me if this one just goes unnoticed. I’m sure however that this very moment will be marked as the turning point of when the United States effectively hands over global responsibility. A remarkable moment.

The Energy That Won’t Obey

This is where I think my lens through which I look at the world truly shines, because reading the media right now just makes one even more confused.

I look at everything as flows. Think of all human networks, contacts, logistics, transactions, as really just energy in some form flowing between nodes. And this is not hypothetical or something I label on top of other explanations. I see it as the fundamental pattern of the universe. The things you hear about, politics, events, wars, are manifestations of those movements as we humans interpret them.

So let me show you how I see this.

First, the physical reality. Hormuz carries 20% of the world’s oil and LNG. In previous eras, like during the 1970s oil crisis, America was so relatively superior to anyone else that it could use its navy to make sure the strait stayed open. But look at how the math has inverted. Iran is now able to use cheap drones for a fraction of the price to disrupt the entire global market. In other words, Iran has shown the world that the US can no longer control every chokepoint at acceptable cost. Which is why the post I showed you is so remarkable. Iran didn’t even have to say it themselves. Trump just admitted it.

Secondly, the US has spent and is still spending enormous amounts of money on munitions, an estimated $5.6 billion just during the first two days. Yet the US still doesn’t control the strait.

To understand the significance of this, we need to look at the larger picture. Since 1945, the US has been the world’s guarantor of security for so many countries. Europe, the Gulf states, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan. This very moment shows that the relative power between America now and what it used to be has declined to a level where even a mid-sized country like Iran can fully contest it. And the pinnacle of it all is that the strait itself is vital to the very allies America has vowed to protect.

The Loops That Are Closing

There is this loop of flows between Israel, the US, and the Gulf states that has kept reinforcing itself. But here is where it gets really interesting.

The US just agreed to lift the Russian oil embargo because of oil market pressure. At the same time, Ukraine is helping out with their drone tech in the Gulf region. If you look at it as flows instead of politics, you can see how the whole Russia/Ukraine situation starts connecting into the first loop. The energy has started to circulate:

US bombs Iran → Iran closes Hormuz → US lifts Russia sanctions → Russia funds Ukraine war → Ukraine helps Gulf states fight Iran → Iran targets Ukraine’s allies.

And with even more time, actors like China could get drawn in as well, which was interestingly enough the first country Trump urged should help in the region.

It’s even more remarkable when you consider the fact that China just got some of their ships through because Tehran allowed them to do so. And they weren’t alone. Both Turkey and India managed to get the same clearance from the Iranians. What this shows is that the US is de facto no longer the main node in the system. Iran is deciding who passes and who doesn’t. The gatekeeper changed.

So what I’m seeing is the entire geometry of the world reshaping. And the narratives that news stations pump out, and the so-called experts, they don’t really matter unless they talk about very specific points that are physical and verifiable.

The Fractures Within

There are two more parameters to keep in mind.

First, the US domestically. David Sacks, the White House crypto and AI tsar, just publicly urged America to withdraw as quickly as possible. I can only assume that he is starting to see how the momentum is building. At the same time, the US is sending 2,500 more Marines to the region. And let’s look back at the contradictions in the post: the US claims it has destroyed 100% of Iran’s capabilities. Yet, and Trump says it himself, they can “still launch a drone or two or some missiles.”

The administration is trying to escalate and exit simultaneously.

That’s geometrically impossible.

Second, and perhaps even more fascinating: the munitions. Estimates suggest Iran can produce around a hundred ballistic missiles per month. The US can produce the same category of defense interceptors, called THAAD, at a rate of 96 per year. Look at that difference again. Per month versus per year. And bear in mind we haven’t even started talking about China.

Every THAAD fired in the Gulf is a THAAD not available for Taiwan. Every Tomahawk launched at Iran is a Tomahawk not deterring China. The same president who just asked China to send ships to Hormuz is simultaneously depleting the weapons stockpile that deters China in the Pacific. Beijing doesn’t need intelligence satellites to know this. They just need to read the post.

The Sound of a Structure Breaking

Every part I just mentioned feeds into each other. Russia, now with the lifted embargo, benefits tremendously from the chaos. The more ships China gets through the strait on bilateral terms with Iran, the more it benefits as well. I suspect China and Russia will finally build a direct land link for oil and gas to make sure this kind of disruption never threatens them again, which brings them even closer together. Meanwhile, Gulf states are recalculating their allegiance to the West, and Israel is making itself even more isolated.

And it seems like Trump is aware of it, hence the more-than-usual erratic post. But the flows keep pulling him in. The momentum is stronger than he anticipated. “Let’s bomb the hell out of the shoreline” says it all. Sheer desperation.

I remember watching the Soviet Union fall and not understanding what I was seeing. I think most people reading that post today don’t fully understand what they’re seeing either. But the structure is the same. An overextended superpower, depleted by military adventures it can’t afford, watching its client states recalculate their alignments in real time, while the system it built reorganizes around it rather than through it.

The Soviet Union didn’t fall because someone defeated it. It fell because the energy cost of maintaining its position exceeded the energy the system could provide. The geometry became unsustainable, and one day, the structure that looked permanent simply wasn’t there anymore.

“Hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others will send Ships.”

That’s not a call to action. That’s the sound of a structure discovering it isn’t there anymore.

He got 309 upvotes. People seemed to love it.

But I actually don’t think it’s a scam. It’s more of a thermodynamic overhang.

Last week, Anthropic released a set of new features that automate work across legal, finance and data services. Within four days, $611 billion in market value evaporated. Thomson Reuters had its worst week ever. Morningstar posted its steepest drop since 2009. Salesforce, HubSpot, Atlassian, Zscaler; all down double digits. Hedge fund exposure to software hit a record low.

And here’s the interesting part: the fundamentals for these companies are actually improving. Earnings projections are going up, so they aren’t dying. But the repricing is happening for a real reason. The world is changing and the indicators are flipping, the same way an overheating engine makes all the sensors scream at once. The readings look random if you’re staring at individual gauges. They make perfect sense if you understand that the system itself is under pressure.

To understand where that pressure comes from, it helps to look at this as a stack.

At the base you have companies like Nvidia producing world-class chips. Above them, the data centers and the foundation models. These layers have been extraordinarily efficient. They’ve compressed rapidly into stable primitives: reliable chips, powerful models, clean APIs. Think of this as a reservoir filling up. So far, so good.

Now all that energy needs somewhere to go. The assumption was that the application layer, Salesforce, Adobe, the entire SaaS ecosystem, would act as the turbine. They would take all that compute and turn it into value. Well, last week, the turbine cracked.

Not because the demand for results is fake. It’s very real. But the demand for middlemen is collapsing. And when the reservoir keeps filling and the turbine can’t handle the pressure, the water doesn’t politely wait. It floods. That flood is what we’re watching right now.

The pressure has created two problems, and both are fascinating.

The first is the startup graveyard. New model updates are constantly reshaping what’s possible, which means startups keep chasing product-market fits that dissolve under their feet. Think of these as falling stars: they burn bright and die fast. In startup world this is usually called a “hockey stick.” But the physical truth is that the sharper the hockey stick, the shorter it lasts. A company that had product-market fit in year one might not have it in year two, because the models just got better and made their product redundant.

A good example is the Swedish startup Lovable. Their own growth manager writes openly about this challenge. In her words, “PMF is changing every few months.” They managed to capture one early wave, and a couple of months later it was basically dead. But investors had already poured hundreds of millions into the project and are now betting that the brand itself will sustain. The startups with enough capital to reinvent themselves as a PR operation and survive on momentum are the lucky ones. The rest will die.

The second problem is even more interesting.

For years, tech companies have mass-recruited layers of people who served as redundant overhead. Not just product people; managers, scrum masters, coordinators, facilitators. I remember sitting in a meeting with seven other people, discussing changes to a portal that only I could build. All of them were redundant. The meeting lasted two hours.

This is how most SaaS companies operate. This is how their internal structure is built. And the problem is that in order to catch the new gradients AI is creating, you need to be flexible. You need to tear down walls and build new ones. But that becomes nearly impossible when you have layers of management with no building skills. They aren’t walls that channel energy; they’re walls that block it.

And the best example goes right back to Lovable. A competing product called Base44 does exactly the same thing, builds websites for you with an LLM. It was created by one person. One guy who sold it to Wix for $80 million in six months. No team, no managers, no meetings about meetings.

There’s a recursive loop here that makes this worse. The moment a startup takes VC money, it needs to raise the complexity of its organizational structure to accommodate the scale that venture capital demands. That complexity means more people, which means more managers, which means more waste heat. It’s thermodynamics: inject energy into a system and the system builds channels to dissipate it. The money doesn’t make the product better. It makes the organization more complex. And that complexity becomes the very thing that prevents the company from adapting when the ground shifts.

Meanwhile, AI keeps getting better, and one or two people with the right tools are outperforming entire teams that need coordination, consensus, and Confluence pages. The gap between what a lean operator can do and what a funded organization can do is flipping. It used to be that money bought capability. Now money buys mass, and mass is a liability.

This isn’t new. The exact same thing played out in the late nineties. Internet infrastructure compressed fast; fiber optics, servers, browsers all hit stable primitives with clean interfaces. The reservoir filled. And then thousands of companies rushed the application layer trying to be the turbine between all that infrastructure and actual users. Pets.com, Webvan, Kozmo. None of them had real channels. They were just energy spilling everywhere.

What happened next wasn’t a bubble popping. It was the system cleaning house. Amazon survived. Google survived. Eventually Facebook. They found specific channels and built them tight enough that energy flowed through with minimal spill. Everyone else was waste heat.

My prediction: the AI application layer will consolidate brutally within 18 months. Not because funding dries up. Not because the technology disappoints. Because this is what systems do. They eliminate inefficient pathways as they find their flow patterns. The infrastructure will survive. The chips will be produced. The data centers will be built. But the companies capturing that energy won’t be the ones we know today.

The Reddit commenter is right about the absurdity but he’s wrong about the conclusion. The demand is real and the money isn’t fake. But the turbines we built to capture it are the wrong shape: the pressure will find new channels as it always does.

If you’re building something in AI right now and you can’t identify the specific gradient you’re channeling, not “AI for whatever” but a real, narrow problem where you’re the tightest path between supply and demand, then you’re not the turbine.

You’re the spill.

If you want to understand the physics behind this, start with my manifesto.

One of Mr Faggin’s core theses is that quantum mechanics itself is the ultimate evidence of free will. He teamed up with a renowned quantum physicist and derived some interesting math suggesting that no quantum bit is truly identical, and that is basically how he draws the parallel to our will. Another claim he makes is that machines will never become conscious because they are built on discrete patterns, 1 and 0, which are inherently not quantum and therefore not conscious. If you didn’t fully get that, it’s ok: he is essentially reassuring us that they will forever be machines and we humans will always be special.

He ties the basis for his theory to a personal revelation he had in life, where he felt what he describes as an overwhelming form of love; something so strong it felt physically elevating. From there he concluded that it had to originate from something deeper than material processes.

I think some of his points have merit, but there are core issues with what he is claiming.

First, he talks about computers being 1 and 0 and therefore just symbolic abstractions that cannot be quantum. That argument falls apart, because if everything is quantum - which is our current best understanding - then it doesn’t matter if computers are built from bits. The bits themselves are implemented in quantum matter, and everything built on top of them obeys the same underlying physics. By quantum I mean what underlies classical physics: quantum mechanics is the most fundamental layer we know. It doesn’t make sense that computers would somehow be excluded from the same mechanisms we humans are built from, even if they operate in a more classical regime.

Second, our DNA is composed of only A, T, C and G; a small symbolic alphabet that encodes everything about us. The very fundamentals of our genome are discrete and symbolic, in a way not entirely unlike how a computer’s CPU operates. So the argument that discreteness alone prevents consciousness isn’t very convincing.

Third, if consciousness is fundamental, then why did it need 13.8 billion years of evolution to get to us? If consciousness was already there at the quantum level, already possessing agency and will, the entire chain of development - from hydrogen clouds to stellar fusion to planetary accretion to single-celled life to primates - would be unnecessary. The timeline itself is the argument. Thirteen point eight billion years of increasing complexity is exactly what you’d expect if consciousness is emergent. It’s hard to reconcile if consciousness is already fully fundamental and agentic at the base layer.

Mr Faggin mentions Leibniz, a philosopher known for his work on Monads; entities he posited the universe is made of, small windows that we individuals among others occupy. His logic is that Monads are miniature versions of the universe that we experience from within. And these ultimately come from God.

If you have read my previous posts you can probably predict what I felt while watching his interview. But let me try to steelman his point of view. I think where we actually converge is on the underlying force that drives everything in the universe. He calls it consciousness, Schopenhauer called it Will, and I look at physics and call it energy. In that sense, I think he is pointing at something real. But based on what we know today, I just can’t buy into the claim that consciousness itself is fundamental.

And there is another Italian I find myself closer to: Carlo Rovelli. He talks about how everything at the quantum level is relational. I claim something similar but in the classical world. It’s all a relative play between energy concentrations that create layers of complexity from which new patterns emerge. The fundamental principle is simple: just as the sun dissipates energy through fusion, the earth dissipates it through complex structures. Certain conditions favour complexity more than others. I’ll write more on this, but if you want a sense of my worldview, start with my manifesto.

I don’t understand why such a brilliant mind would turn away from science; he kept calling it “scientism”, when it’s actually possible to derive a deeper and more consistent framework from what humanity collectively knows today, one that even has predictive power. Federico promised that he will prove his point by showing that trees are conscious. Even if that were demonstrated, it still wouldn’t convince me of the broader theory he’s proposing.

And while I understand the comforting effect his ideas have on many people, I’ll personally stick to physics and postulate:

The sense of ‘me’ is irreversible mass pinning causality to a bounded system.

At least I’m giving you space to tell me why I’m wrong.

Let me give you my perspective upfront: the ones who don’t learn AI will fall behind. And the more you use it, the better you’ll understand its limitations. That experience won’t come from holding back or reasoning yourself to better answers, the way some alignment communities seem to think. It’s my opinion, take it for what it is, but I don’t think creating more academia is what the world needs right now. We need to start shoveling.

But here’s the thing that makes this shame absurd: a lot of the code running our world is already being generated by LLMs. I know because I work with it every day. Your life literally depends on AI-assisted work regardless of your opinions about it. The ship has sailed. The question isn’t whether to use these tools. It’s whether to get good at using them.

Now to the opposition’s arguments: “LLMs will flatter you and tell you you’re a genius.” “LLMs can’t be trusted.” And my favorite, from a well-known alignment community: “Even at lower levels of intensity, ChatGPT is likely to tell you your ideas are fundamentally good and special, even when humans would consider them sloppy or confusing.”

Well, if the standard for high-quality content is “humans don’t get confused,” we’re all in trouble. Try explaining relativity to the average person. Or better yet, quantum mechanics. It should be obvious why this metric is broken.

The root of the problem is twofold.

First: lineage. The early versions of GPT, Grok, and the rest were exactly that, first iterations. They had real flaws, especially around sycophancy. AI would say whatever made you feel good, and therefore, the argument went, all your conclusions were suspect. But those times have changed. OpenAI has published extensively on how they’re addressing this. The world isn’t static. What was true eighteen months ago isn’t necessarily true today.

Second: gatekeeping. Or if I’m being less generous, intellectual protectionism. A group of people whose absolute conviction is that they alone can form the basis for our future. And I base this on one fact: if your argument is “it was written or co-written with an LLM, therefore it’s not trustworthy,” you’ve already failed. You’re not engaging with the content. You’re performing gatekeeping.

The right approach is to argue the actual facts. Engage. Ask why. Just like you would with any statement from a human, an organization, or an AI. If someone won’t defend their reasoning, fine, dismiss them. But if they’re prepared to engage and you refuse? You’re the one doing humanity a disservice.

I understand the frustration with people claiming AI is conscious or whatever else. But the gatekeeping path, dismissing everything touched by AI, can’t be the way forward.

My advice: start evaluating arguments on their merits. Whether an LLM was involved will become increasingly irrelevant. Learn to use these tools well, or watch as others do.

Europe punches far above its demographic weight - yet growth tells a different story.

Mario Draghi’s report said it plainly: Europe must reform or fall behind. Hundreds of pages of evidence. The elites nodded. But I doubt most of them read it. So let me say it differently.

The Lake and the Land

Imagine the economy as a lake. The land around it is where growth happens - but only if it rains. Rain comes from clouds. Clouds come from steam. Steam comes from boiling water.

What determines whether water boils? Temperature variance.

Variance means unequal outcomes: some failing hard, some succeeding wildly, most somewhere in between.

Map the US onto this model. The lake has pockets of wildly different temperatures - some freezing, some literally boiling. Chaotic, unequal, volatile. But somewhere, the water is always boiling. Steam rises. Clouds form. Rain falls. Growth happens.

Now map Europe. The lake sits at a comfortable 22°C. Uniform. Regulated. Safe. The welfare system keeps it that way. A few pockets are slightly warmer, a few slightly cooler, but the variance is narrow.

The problem is now obvious: if you can’t reach boiling point, no clouds form. No clouds, no rain. No rain, no growth.

The Physics of Stagnation

Growth isn’t gradual. You can’t warm a lake from 22°C to 23°C and expect rain. Growth requires phase transition - the moment water becomes steam, escapes the system, and returns as something that nourishes new ground.

Europe has regulated away the heat. The variance required for phase transition is not permitted. The lake stays comfortable. And dry land stays dry.

You might object: clouds form without boiling. Evaporation happens at any temperature.

True. But two problems:

1. The lake is cooling. Without growth, the water loses heat. The already-narrow variance compresses further. Evaporation slows to almost nothing.

2. If we don’t water our own soil, someone else will. American clouds are already raining on European land - in cloud infrastructure, AI, platforms. Our digital lives run on water that evaporated somewhere else.

The Bind

No one wants to live in boiling water. But no one wants to live in a lake that’s slowly cooling either. Europe chose comfort and got stagnation. The welfare system that protects the temperature is the same system that prevents the steam.

Draghi’s point, underneath all the policy language, was simple: we need heat.

Not cruelty. Not American inequality. But variance. Permission to fail and permission to succeed. Pockets where the temperature can rise enough to boil.

This isn’t ideology. It’s physics.

Water doesn’t become rain by staying comfortable. It becomes rain by boiling, escaping, rising, and returning.

And if we don’t boil the water and create the growth, someone will do it for us.

That’s not politics. That’s thermodynamics.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Written in early 2026, during a period of visible political and social instability in the United States.

Things in society are shaking right now. Especially in the United States. You might be wondering what is happening.

The short answer: no, everything is not going to hell, and we will get out of this trap eventually. It is a societal cycle observed many times over. The Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun described the rise and fall of civilizations through generational cycles of cohesion and decay. Strauss and Howe mapped similar patterns in American history, identifying recurring turnings every 80 to 100 years. Some people refer to René Girard, whose work on mimetic desire and scapegoating you can read about here.

Society goes through emotions, just like we do. It might be hard to believe, but it is explainable with pure physics. Thermodynamics. It is not just a metaphor. It is really the pressure building up with nowhere to go.

Let me explain with America. But first, let us go through how natural phenomena such as lightning occur.

How Lightning Forms

Thunder (more precisely: lightning, with thunder as its acoustic consequence) happens when negative and positive charges are separated to such a degree that the air between them can no longer withstand the force. The separation creates an enormous electric field. When a critical threshold is crossed, the air can no longer remain insulating. It ruptures. That rupture is the lightning. Thunder is the sound that follows, caused by the air expanding violently after being heated almost instantaneously.

When the imbalance between negative charge at the bottom of the cloud and positive charge on the ground grows large enough, variance in the air increases sharply. Chemically this is described as ionization, but what it means physically is that electrons normally bound to molecules are torn loose and begin to move freely. The air locally stops behaving like an insulator and starts behaving more like a conductor.

This movement is not uniform. Small random differences mean that in some regions electrons move more easily than in others. Where movement is easier, conductivity increases. Where conductivity increases, even more current flows. This creates a positive feedback loop.

Because the cloud is already internally polarized, with regions of high local charge density, lower air density, and partially ionized pockets, this breakdown begins there. Weak, branching conductive paths form and propagate downward. These paths do not yet carry the main discharge. They act as probes, exploring where resistance is lowest.

Near the ground, the electric field becomes extremely concentrated around sharp or elevated objects. Trees, towers, and buildings respond by launching short upward streamers. Most fail. One eventually connects. When that happens, resistance collapses, a single channel locks in, and the accumulated energy is released in a fraction of a second.

Now Look at the United States

Over the past decades, the separation between the top and the bottom has increased dramatically. Since 1980, the share of total wealth held by the top 1% has grown from approximately 25% to over 35%. Today, the top 5% hold more wealth than the bottom 80% combined.

Wealth, mobility, influence, and insulation have concentrated upward, while large parts of the population have become increasingly constrained. This is not just inequality in a moral sense. It is a growing gradient. Energy, economic, psychological, political, accumulates because it cannot dissipate evenly through institutions that once acted as conductors.

People often call the comparison to lightning a metaphor. It is not. It is the same thermodynamic pattern playing out in a different medium.

Leaders emerge not because they carry the energy, but because they can move more easily. They have lower resistance: money, platforms, networks, reach. They branch, probe, and explore paths across cities, counties, and landscapes. Most attempts go nowhere.

Meanwhile, the ground is not passive. Grassroots groups, local organizers, and socially elevated nodes, the equivalent of trees and towers, respond to the growing field. They concentrate pressure locally.

When a probing path from above connects with a primed structure below, resistance collapses. The release looks sudden, but it was prepared over years. What erupts is not created in the moment. It is discharged.

The Pattern

If you look carefully at what happened on January 6th, you can see this structure clearly. A long period of charge separation. Blocked dissipation. Probing leaders. Responsive ground nodes. Followed by a sudden, violent release once a viable path formed.

This is the Girardian pattern: mimetic tension accumulating until it discharges through a scapegoat or an event. It is visible in Ibn Khaldun’s cycles of asabiyyah, the social cohesion that builds and then fractures. It appears in Peter Turchin’s work on secular cycles and elite overproduction.

Or in my own words: the worm shredding. The system twisting under uneven load until structure fails. Societal compression. The off-charge.

Nature does not care about narratives. It cares about gradients. When variance grows too large and small releases are blocked, rupture is not a failure of morality.

It is a property of the system.

The question is not whether the next discharge will come. It is whether we can build systems that allow energy to dissipate before the rupture.

Intelligence is a stitcher of what we have already discovered. It is not a discoverer.

Look at LLMs. What “intelligence” foresaw what GPT would be able to do? None. Not even the researchers building it.

It was a pure accident. Scale plus architecture plus data, and suddenly: emergence.

That accident is evidence of Entropy Mining. The brute-force collision of energy against the unknown. The discovery came from drilling into reality, not from stitching existing patterns together.

In a couple of years, researchers will understand exactly how LLMs work. They’ll name the phenomena. They’ll write the equations. And in 100 years, people will say how “smart” we were to “invent” LLMs.

But we didn’t invent them. We stumbled into them.

Intelligence came after. To stitch the accident into something explainable.

Even the original neural network model wasn’t invented by contemplation. It was derived from nature itself. From how neurons actually fire. Someone looked at the territory and copied it.

That’s not intelligence creating. That’s intelligence mapping what entropy mining already revealed.

Why Chain of Thought Works

This explains why chain-of-thought prompting works so well.

When you prompt an LLM with a single complex question, you’re asking it to make a hole-in-one. You’re demanding it leap across the entire stitched map in one jump, where the probability of error is highest.

But when you use chain of thought, you’re doing something different. You are artificially introducing constraint.

You are forcing the model to lower the entropy of the next token by narrowing the search space step-by-step.

Each step constrains the next. Each answer collapses the probability distribution.

Chain of thought isn’t making the model “smarter.” It’s making the stitching tighter. It is the difference between guessing the destination and tracing the immediate gradient of the road.

The Map is Not the Territory

Intelligence is not reality. It is a map of reality.

The linearizations, the operating points, the disciplines, the frameworks. They are attempts to describe parts of the non-linear reality we live in.

Imagine intelligence as a coordination system. A map of the current state that we constantly update to make sure it’s navigable.

That’s useful. Essential, even. But it has limits.

The Water Test

Imagine water’s phase transitions were unknown to the internet. Nowhere in the training data. Now ask an LLM: “What happens if we heat water to 110°C?”

It would say: “The water becomes very hot.”

It cannot predict the phase shift. It cannot anticipate that water transforms into steam. Because phase transitions are non-linear. They are not extensions of the pattern. They are breaks in the pattern.

Intelligence stitches patterns. Reality breaks them.

The Hollowing Out

A recent paper by two Boston University professors argues that AI hollows out institutions. It makes them appear functional while removing the structural integrity underneath.

This is not surprising if you understand what intelligence actually is.

Generative AI expands the stitcher based on patterns already in the stitcher. Map stitched to map stitched to map.

That is very different from analyzing the real world and then expanding the map.

When institutions replace real sensing with AI-generated stitching, they lose contact with the territory. The map looks complete. The tensile strength is gone.

And when the territory shifts, the map tears.

The Danger

The danger is not that AI is too intelligent.

The danger is that we’ve confused stitching for drilling.

We are expanding the map while forgetting to check the territory.

The stitcher is growing. The drill is rusting.

And somewhere beneath our feet, the gradient is shifting.

Discovery requires a Drill. Intelligence is just the historian that writes the plaque.

In 2015, I predicted Trump would win.

At first, I assumed it was luck.

But the more I examined why I believed it, the clearer it became that I was not following narratives. I was reading pressure.

I grew up moving between social strata, from housing projects in Poland to the welfare state of Sweden. That forced me, early on, to see society both from below and above.

When I later visited the US and spoke to people outside institutional bubbles, cab drivers, waiters, small business owners, I noticed a mismatch.

The stories said stability.

The gradient said strain.

Around the same time, I noticed that others, from very different backgrounds, had sensed the same pressure. Peter Thiel was one of them. He later pointed to René Girard as an influence. Girard, in turn, led me toward thermodynamics.

This is not a story about elections or individuals.

It is about how large systems signal change long before language catches up, and how those signals are invisible if you only read from a single line while the curve is already bending beneath you.

The reason I am writing this blog is that I believe the current view humanity holds is flawed; it assumes that we somehow sidestep our environment - that we are not truly part of nature or the universe itself. In a world becoming increasingly noisy and chaotic, I realized I needed to find a better lens through which to view life. This became urgent with the rise of AI, but the search started much earlier.

I did not grow up in a comfortable or intellectual environment. I grew up in the projects. No father. A mother doing her best but often absent. My childhood was split between Poland and Sweden - two completely different worlds, especially in the 90s when Poland was still shaking off the Soviet era.

Poland was among the poorer countries in the world, and probably one of the poorest in Europe by that time. At the same time, Sweden was the richest. The contrast was enormous. I remember asking my uncle why everything looked so destroyed in Poland, to which he replied: the war. Hitler, he told me. I had no idea what either was, but it sparked a deep desire in me to understand why things happen as they do.

I never fully belonged anywhere. I looked Middle Eastern. I was Polish. I lived in Sweden. I was always the “other.”

That environment forces you to ask questions early. I was four years old when I asked my mother: “If the population grew from one billion to six, where did all the new souls come from?”

As a teenager, everything fell apart. I crashed into depression. Failed high school. I felt as though the bottom had fallen out from beneath my life. Because I had absolutely nothing left, I had to rebuild.

That was the beginning of the model I am about to share.

A brief note before I continue: I am not interested in substances. I do not even drink. I train, and I am physically healthy. I simply have a compulsion to think. And when I push that thinking far enough, I begin to see systems in their entirety. That is a trait I have carried since I was a child.

The Error of Linearity

Here is why I believe our current way of thinking is incorrect: most people think linearly.

We ground ourselves at a specific point - think of it like dropping a pin on Google Maps. You get a specific perspective of the geographic place you drop yourself onto. Think of it as your home, your harbour that you always return to. Everything you see and experience is anchored at that single point.

Usually, this anchor consists of culture, language, family, and career. These things shape how you frame the world. This is natural and extremely useful; in mathematics, we call this local linearization. We do it because the world is, by nature, chaotic.

You have likely felt this if you have visited a new city for the first time - the overwhelming flood of impressions, the chaos of things happening everywhere. But perhaps after a while, a friend introduced you to the right pubs, the best restaurants, and the local people. Suddenly, the place you visited on the first day became something else entirely, even though it was geographically the very same place.

That is the Anchor Effect. That is how you ground your perspective.

This mechanism pertains to everything we do in life; even academic disciplines function this way. Biology is a framing - a local linearization. The same applies to physics, chemistry, and economics. But here is the catch: the world is non-linear. This means that we often have to approximate reality because it simply does not fit the framework we are trying to explain it with.

This concept is standard in the field I used to study: electronics. Every transistor (you have trillions of them in your pocket right now) works this way. It would be too difficult to calculate the true, complex characteristic of the transistor every time, so we give it a perspective - technically called an Operating Point.

We draw a straight line through that point and say: if we stay close enough to this perspective, we can assume the line is true. This is the core concept of most engineering disciplines.

The problem is that we apply this to our lives as well. As the world becomes more advanced and sophisticated, this linear explanation simply isn’t good enough anymore. You can see that some lines even overlap. Many disciplines in academia actually use different terms for the exact same underlying phenomenon.

For example: physicists call it Entropy (disorder); psychologists call it Anxiety (uncertainty). They act like these are different things. They aren’t. They are just two different operating points on the same curve of “Chaos Management.”

What I want to share is a perspective for the future: seeing the whole curve instead of just the line.

The Cycle of Compression

This is not going to be the only new line. We create many lines all the time, and that is good. That is how it should be. Exploration requires divergence. New disciplines, new frameworks, new operating points - this is how we map the unknown.

But once in a while, we need to compress. We need to step back and draw a new line - one that is more robust, one that touches the curve at points that don’t overlap with other disciplines without knowing they are the same thing. We need to collapse the redundancy. We need to see that Entropy and Anxiety are the same phenomenon viewed from different angles.

That is what I am attempting here.

And in time, this line too will need to be redrawn. The curve will reveal new complexity. New explorers will diverge again. And then, someone will compress again.

This is not my opinion. This is the cycle of the universe. Expansion. Compression. Expansion. Compression. The breath of understanding itself.

What is required to see the curve?

There are four requirements. Three are physical; one is psychological.

1. We are not things; we are processes.

It might be hard to believe, but you are not really a “thing.” You are something called a dissipative structure, which is a fancier name for an advanced candle flame.

You dissipate heat, the same way a candle does. You eat food and breathe; that is your stearin. Of course, the candle does not have a “me,” memory, eyes, or organs, but that is not the point. The point is that you are a fire - a reaction that eventually stops burning.

This happens because both you and the candle hold stored energy (low entropy). The world in general is high entropy. You are creating a pocket of order in this space of “mud,” and you can only do so because you extract energy from external sources.

A famous illustration of this is life as a whirlpool in a river. You exist because the river (the flow of energy in the universe) makes the whirlpool possible. You are that very whirlpool. If you stop the flow, the whirlpool vanishes. The water remains, but the “self” is gone.

2. The fundamental law of the universe is Thermodynamics.

It might sound scary, but it is really simple: everything flows from low entropy (order) to high entropy (disorder).

Think of a battery: you have a plus and a minus, and a current flows in between. That is precisely how everything works. From the very atoms, all the way up to humans and civilizations. We are not in any shape or form exempted from these laws. We are engines that run on this gradient.

3. Complexity requires scale.

This is what I call the Complexity Scale Law: the more complex a system becomes, the more scale it requires to sustain itself.

This is consistent with how the universe works and converges with similarly stated laws across many disciplines. A single cell requires less energy than an organ. An organ requires less than a body. A body requires less than a city. A city requires less than a civilization.

This matters because it tells us what the future requires for complexity to evolve. We can already see the beginnings of it with AI: more energy, larger data centers, stronger GPUs. This is not a coincidence. This is the law expressing itself.

Complexity is not free. Scale is the price.

4. The Hard Part (The Discipline).

The hard part is overriding your natural instincts.

We are biologically hardwired to default to our human-centric, linearized perspective. Seeing the curve requires bending your mind, but at the same time, sticking extremely disciplined to rules #1, #2, and #3.

It is a bit like learning to bungee jump. It is nerve-wracking to jump off the ledge, but once you do, you realize the physics holds you. I use tools to keep me grounded. I use AI and LLMs to check my logic. If the model tells me I am breaking the laws of thermodynamics, I usually am. I go back to the rules. I understand it, and I loop.

The Primitive Propagation Principle

Now, let me state the core principle. It is the fractal nature of reality. The same pattern repeats at every scale - from electrons holding voltage to humans holding identity. The constraint is the same all the way up the stack.

Why does this work? Because of what I call the Primitive Propagation Principle.

The principle is simple: if a system becomes low entropy and stable enough, it becomes a primitive for a larger system. Atoms become primitives for molecules. Molecules become primitives for cells. Cells become primitives for organisms. Organisms become primitives for societies.

But let me be precise about what this does and does not claim.

Thermodynamics does not determine what emerges at higher levels. It constrains which emergent structures can persist, compose, and propagate. The framework does not predict what emerges - wetness, language, institutions. It predicts which emergent phenomena stabilize, become compressible, and serve as primitives for the next layer.

However, the Complexity Scale Law tells us something else: whatever emerges will require more scale to sustain. This gives us a direction. We cannot predict the content of the future, but we can predict its cost. Complexity trends upward. Scale trends upward. This is not a guess - it is the trajectory.

Emergent layers introduce radically novel phenomena with their own irreducible logics. Game theory is not thermodynamics. Semiotics is not thermodynamics. But a game-theoretic equilibrium that leaks energy too fast collapses. A meaning system that cannot stabilize attention decays.

Thermodynamics is a meta-constraint. It does not replace other logics; it bounds them.

A system becomes a primitive only if it:

1. Maintains low internal entropy

2. Exposes a stable interface

3. Can be composed without reintroducing internal complexity

4. Remains valid across a range of environments

Most structures fail at (2) through (4). Most rocks stay rocks. Most ideas dissolve. Most companies die.

But a few expose stable interfaces. A few compress. A few propagate constraint upward.

Those are the primitives. Those are the building blocks. Those are us.

Compression works because the universe already compresses. We are just learning to read its architecture.

The Abrasive Vortex

Let me extend the whirlpool analogy I mentioned earlier.

The core image is not mine - it comes from well-respected scientists studying dissipative systems. It is a way to picture what being a process really means.

The water flowing in the river is the universe’s energy - a constant flow. We only exist because that flow exists. We live in that flow. You are not a thing sitting in the water. You are a motion. A whirlpool.

This is not poetry. This is physics.

But a static whirlpool only explains something like a candle flame - it just exists, it burns, it dissipates. We are more than that. We have memories. We have will. We have ambition. We accumulate.

That is why I extended the analogy into what I call the Abrasive Vortex.

Imagine a high-pressure jet of water spinning in a circle.

The Water:

By itself, water is soft. If you shoot pure water at a wall of hard clay (The Future/Entropy), it just splashes off. It has no “bite.” It has flow, but no Consequence.

The Accumulation:

But this whirlpool creates a suction. It starts pulling in rocks, sand, and debris from the riverbed. This is your Memory, your Trauma, your Biology.

The whirlpool binds this debris into its outer rim.

Suddenly, it is not just spinning water. It is a rotating wall of abrasive grit.

We accumulate mass - not just physical, but informational. Kahneman called it Loss Aversion. I call it Gravity. Our memories and identity have weight. That weight is what gives the drill its bite.

The Drill:

Now, when this mass-loaded whirlpool touches the mud, it doesn’t splash. It grinds.

The centrifugal force of the water pushes the rocks outward.

The rocks bite into the static mud of the universe.

It literally bores a hole through the resistance.

The Flow:

Because it drilled a hole, water from behind rushes in to fill the void.

We don’t move because we “decide” to.

We move because we ground the rock away, and the physics of the river pushed us into the space we just ate.

The Arc:

This is a visual of how life actually works. The “will” comes from the spinning itself. And will moves in pulses - you don’t just spin continuously. You take breaks. You spin faster, slower. You breathe. And then, with enough mass - which is another word for all your memories, experiences, education, relationships - you push through the mud.

But here is the catch: eventually you accumulate so much mass that the flow can no longer bear the weight. It becomes impossible to keep spinning.

That is what we call the end of life.

The Rocket Fallacy

The other metaphor I want to address is actually a remix of a famous thought experiment - the Rocket Analogy, often brought up by thinkers like Max Tegmark and Nick Bostrom in the context of AI Safety.

It is a philosophical experiment about humanity’s challenge with AI - one that mainstream philosophy has no good answer to. But if you accept the way I frame our existence, the answer becomes obvious. The reason mainstream philosophy cannot answer it is because they insist on separating humans from the universe.

The analogy goes like this: Imagine humanity (or AI) is a Rocket. The “Intelligence” is the engine; the “Alignment” is the steering. The fear is that we are launching a high-velocity projectile into an infinite void without knowing exactly where we are going.

Current academia offers two solutions:

The “Trim Tab” Solution: Use tiny nudges to steer the massive ship.

The “Coordinate” Solution: Pre-calculate the perfect destination before launching.

Last time I checked, Elon Musk was sleeping on the factory floor during the Model 3 production hell. He wasn’t “trimming a tab.” You cannot use a Trim Tab when you are stuck in the mud. Trim Tabs require flow. Musk had to generate the flow manually by injecting massive amounts of energy into the system.

And the second explanation? Well, we are here. Evolution produced us without a map, without coordinates, and without a pre-defined destination. If the “Coordinate Solution” were true, life would have never started.

There is a deeper problem with the Rocket philosophy: it assumes paperwork overrides physics.

It doesn’t. It never has. Treaties don’t prevent wars - the cost of war prevents wars. Regulations don’t stop AI - thermodynamics stops AI. Every “exponential growth” curve hits a ceiling. Every system meets resistance. Every intelligence is bound by heat, energy, and time.

The Rocket crowd treats intelligence like magic - a ghost that can grow infinitely without consuming resources. But intelligence is physics. Thinking generates heat. Calculation requires energy. Growth hits S-curves.

This is the Copernican trauma all over again - claiming that we are the center, that mind is separate from matter, that intelligence floats above the laws. It doesn’t. We are not separate from the universe. We are the universe looking back at itself - not in a spiritual kind of way, but physically. That is what E = mc² literally says. Mass is energy. Energy is mass. We are made of the same stuff as stars.

The longer we keep lying to ourselves about this, the more humanity will drift.

Paperwork is noise. Physics is signal.

The Hydro-Drill Solution

The Rocket Analogy makes a fatal error: it assumes we are moving through a vacuum. We aren’t. We are moving through Mud (Entropy).

No Coordinates Needed: A miner doesn’t need to know the GPS coordinates of the diamond. He only needs to know the Gradient. He senses the immediate wall in front of him. Where is the rock softer? Where is the vein? He digs one inch in the direction of lowest entropy.

No Trim Tabs: You cannot steer a drill in mud by “flicking a wrist.” You steer by Mining. You apply metabolic force to grind away the obstacle in the direction you want to go. The steering is the work.

We aren’t optimizing for a distant future. We are manufacturing the immediate future by paying the thermodynamic cost to create it.

The Worm (A Girardian Aside)

Society behaves like a worm eating through entropy.

It moves forward. It consumes chaos. It grows.

But as it eats, it accumulates what it consumes. The worm becomes bloated with entropy, until it grows too heavy to move.

So it compresses. It sheds. It restructures. It returns to a lower-entropy state.

And then it eats again.

This is why societies grow. This is why they fracture. This is why they rebuild.

Expansion. Compression. Expansion. Compression.

The worm does not die. It digests.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The Interference Pattern

We do not drill in a void. We drill in a mine filled with other miners.

When our flows intersect, we create interference. Love is simply constructive interference - where two vortices spin in a way that allows energy to flow through both more efficiently than it could through one.

So Are We Just Physics?

Yes.

But the reason you’re asking is because you inherently think that’s something bad. It isn’t.

Being physics means being the universe. You are a beautiful flow in the river - a whirlpool with mass that you can use to leverage where to spin. This is your will. The moment you realize that everything is part of the universe, we essentially become one. And what you’re realize that it’s actually pretty remarkable how the flow in the universe keeps weaving these beautiful shapes and geometries, that goes deeper and deeper and create evenly more breathtaking fractals, some of them called humans. Let’s stop treating spirituality as a separate entity - instead, unify it with physics and embrace the flow, the flow of life.

But Isn’t This Reductionist?

If you stand on that particular line on the curve, yes.

But my point is that we are fundamentally not that line - we are that curve. It’s not about being either emergent or reductionist. It’s about abandoning this dogma once and for all.

The only reason this framing exists is because we decided to frame it so. And to delve deeper: this is a byproduct of thousands of years of deep conviction that God is the only true entity, and we humans God’s product.

Buddhists, for instance - who are much more aligned with what I’m proposing - would frame it quite differently.

It’s time to move on and adopt something more compatible with the future.

Why I am Writing This

We are living in a time of high entropy. The old stories (the straight lines) are crossing over each other, creating confusion. We are building AI that can read maps, but cannot dig tunnels. We are drowning in information, but starving for structure.

The only way forward is compression. We need to see the curve, not the lines in silos. We need a shared language - one that bridges disciplines, one that bridges humans and machines. Because in the end, physics always wins. The question is whether we learn to speak its language, or keep drowning in translations.

I am not a guru. I don’t have a new religion for you. I am a mechanic.

I want to share the schematic of the drill. I want to talk about how we manage the heat, how we use our gravity, and how we keep the tunnel open when the world tries to close it.

You can do what you want with this. Take the blue pill or the red pill. But I will tell you what I do: I use this lens as the base for understanding reality. And I sprinkle humanity on top.

In the end, we all need a little bit of magic.

Let me tell you what I mean by that.

Remember that Swedish teacher I mentioned? The one who felt “sorry” for the poverty in Poland? I thought that was the strangest thing I had ever heard. Because from where I stood, her life was safe, but it was colorless.

Global suffering does not mean local suffering.

The magic is in the energy - the energy that propagates between people who resonate. And I mean that in the literal sense. We bind, just like atoms. Why? Because trust is a way to conserve energy.

And when that happens, we live.

Think of standing in a football stadium. Tens of thousands of people predicting the same thing - the game. Calibrated for the same energy to propagate. And we feel it. That pulse. That aliveness.

That is life.

Welcome to the construction site.

Girard claimed that humans function by mimicking each other. But that mimicking eventually creates conflict. People mimic until the pressure becomes too high, and a scapegoat is needed to release it.

I always wondered: How could you ever prove that? How do you measure it? Is it actually applicable today?

I know the answer. It’s not psychology. It’s thermodynamics.

What Girard calls “mimicking” is actually us minimizing prediction errors.

The best way to minimize error is to copy. This isn’t just a human quirk; it’s fundamental to the universe. Protons and neutrons bind this way. Atoms bind this way. Energy follows the path of least resistance to conserve itself.

We don’t scapegoat because we are evil. We scapegoat because the system is overheating and physics demands a release valve.

Girard was simply observing thermodynamics through history.

But there’s a specific phase in this thermodynamics that explains violence better than just “overheating.” It’s rigidity.

If we copy each other to minimize error, the system eventually becomes too uniform - like a crystal lattice. Once that happens, energy can no longer dissipate properly. The system loses its ability to adapt to new gradients.

When the structure is that locked, heat can’t flow out. So it starts dissipating inwards. Variance increases within each individual element until the structure inevitably collapses.

This explains Girard’s “Crisis of Undifferentiation.” We don’t fight because we are unpredictable. We fight because we become so hyper-aligned and rigid that the system has no release valve left but total fracture.

The scapegoat, as Girard calls it, is just a heat sink. It’s where the system dumps entropy so it doesn’t melt down.

But looking forward, the physics are changing.

The better the flow, the better the bindings. The universe has shown us this. When flow becomes stable and continuous, prediction errors become small and harmonic. The bindings between parts grow strong. They form the fundamental structures of matter.

Eventually, the flow will become good enough. As we move toward that stability, Girard’s theory of conflict will be less likely to manifest.

It will take a while before we get there. But until then, the Girardians will be right.

Me ≈ W ⊗ T

(I’ll come back to this.)

For years, I was obsessed with a specific bug in the ‘human operating system’.

Newton explained the falling apple. Copernicus proved we aren’t the center of the universe. Einstein showed us that space and time are just geometry.

But they all skipped the User: Me.

Why do we have a Will? Why do we have Consciousness? And above all, Why do we die?

This didn’t just annoy me; it haunted me. Since I was a boy, I watched religion, science, and philosophy fighting for root access to the truth. But their explanations were siloed. They were proprietary patches that didn’t talk to each other. Stubborn as I was, I realized no one was going to give me the manual. I had to reverse-engineer it myself.

Then, at 20, the floor dropped out.

I went through a trauma that didn’t just break me; it formatted the drive. It shattered everything I thought was true. It stripped the paint off the walls and forced me to stare at the structural beams of reality.

That was the moment I stopped taking humanity seriously. Not in a nihilistic way, but in an engineering way. I stopped looking at the “Interface” and started looking at the “Schematic.”

I threw myself into engineering. I became obsessed with linearity, non-linearity, and modeling uncertainty. But I didn’t see it as cold arithmetic. I saw it as Art. It was a language capable of capturing the vibration of the world better than poetry ever could.

One day, after an intense session of math, I looked out the window and the pattern clicked.

If math is just a model of reality, then words are just low-resolution variables. And if they are just variables... I can bend them.

The Attachment Menu

Take “Addiction”, “Desire”, or “Habit”. These are just different words for the same mechanical force: Attachment.

It acts like gravity. It pulls. The more you repeat a behavior, the stronger the pull becomes; eventually it reaches a stable orbit.

Where does this come from?

Rewind to the caveman. His “Attachment Menu” was small. Sharpen a stick, throw a stone, have sex. There was no “Write a Substack”. There was no “Doomscroll”.

But generation after generation, we accumulated these chains of attachment. Culture, knowledge, experience. We built an “Attachment Menu” so large that we created entire industries around it, completely detached from the physics that governs it.

I kept pushing on this. Why do we accumulate? Why do we have Will?

And then I realized the mistake we’ve all been making. We are Copernican Traumatized. We think we are “Things” placed in the Universe.

We are not things. We are Systems.

The Physics of Being

If you want to understand Death, you have to stop looking at Biology; you have to start looking at Thermodynamics.

Imagine the universe is a sea of Lego bricks floating randomly. Now, imagine constant energy flowing through that sea.

From time to time, the energy pushes the bricks into a shape. The shape holds for a moment, forcing the energy to flow through it in a specific pattern. Billions of years pass. The shapes get more complex. Amino acids. Proteins. Cells. Organs. You.

The “Structure” changes, but the energy flow is constant.

You are not the Bricks. You are the energy flowing through increasingly constrained structures.

This makes you a Process, not an Object. And this is where the tragedy begins. To maintain this complex shape, you have to constrain more and more of the flow. You have to accumulate Mass.

The Mass

This is why we get attached. We don’t just “learn”; we absorb.

You cannot un-see. You cannot un-experience. What you experience is Irreversible. That irreversibility is Mass.

We die because we cannot sustain the Mass.

Thermodynamics is clear: every complex system degrades. Errors accumulate. DNA replication is noisy. We call this “Aging”, but an engineer calls it “Compounding Error”. The Telomeres are just a buffer; an extra life in Super Mario. But eventually, the Entropy wins.

So why did evolution build us to die?

This is where Loss Aversion finally made sense to me. We feel losses more heavily than wins because Loss behaves like Gravity.

To predict the future (Will), you need a record of the past (Mass). But if you accumulate Mass, you create Inertia. And if you have Inertia, you eventually cannot turn the ship.

We die because we have Will. We have Will because we have Mass. We have Mass because we die.

It is a closed loop.

We are open thermodynamic loops that survive by capturing information in our physical structure. This structure allows us to act (Will), but eventually, the structure becomes so rigid and filled with the physical residue of past survival (Mass) that it can no longer process new energy. We calcify into our own history.

The Formula

This led me to conclude that there is no single “Me”. There are two.

Me₁ (The Internal): The Mass. The Pull. The Irreversible Memory. The Biological Anchor.

Me₂ (The Relative): The Construct. The Social Graph. The Node in the Network.

The “Sense of Self” is the interference pattern between them. It is the friction of the Social Graph trying to move the Heavy Mass.

Or, formally:

me(t+1) = (W ⊗ T) · g(t)

Where:

• W = World-Loop (The Spatial Boundary: Act → Sense → Adjust)

• T = Time-Loop (The Mass: Accumulate → Constrain → Persist)

• ⊗ = Bidirectional Coupling (Entanglement)

And g(t)? That is the most important variable.

The Pulse

The Will - g(t) - is not a “thing”. It is a Pulse.

The world is high entropy; chaos. To exist as a structure, we must pump that entropy out of our system. We are like Miners digging a tunnel. We dig the chaos out (Will) so the energy flow can move through us.

But you cannot run a pump at 100% capacity forever. It overheats.

The Will must breathe.

Systole (Push): We lower entropy. We assert. We dig. Diastole (Rest): We raise entropy. We accept. We rest.

This explains why we sleep.

When you sleep, g(t) approaches zero.

The machinery (W ⊗ T) is still there, but the Miner has stopped digging.

When g(t) ≈ 0, the Will is silent.

The self persists as inertia, not motion.

Good night.

I stared at it, confused. My partner took a deep look and explained that these are the biggest words on the internet right now. “Brainrot” is self-explanatory, she said, but “6 7” apparently comes from a viral video of a guy yelling “6 7! 6 7!” referring to someone of that height. So, naturally, it became a thing.

I lingered on it for a while. I’ve seen a lot of videos where people yell stuff. So have you. But why this? Why 6’7”?

Here is why: It isn’t random. It is a specific signal from a generation living through a structural collapse.

The world used to be mainly linear. You could get a job, find a partner, buy a house, make babies, and live happily ever after. You barely needed a mortgage. Elite education was accessible to almost everyone. And most importantly, 10% extra effort correlated with 10% extra pay.

Today, the math is different. Even I, post-MSc in Electrical Engineering, sometimes wonder what it was all for. I watch people who barely graduated get hundreds of millions thrown at them because they have, at worst, “an idea,” or at best, a product that caught a quick tailwind and will eventually go to zero.

I have to credit the USA for at least putting fraudsters like SBF and Elizabeth Holmes in prison. But here in Sweden? You can blow up $15 billion, cause 8 deaths, put $200 million in your pocket, and disappear. It makes me wonder why I didn’t just stick to my childhood room, playing video games and eating Whopper Pepper meals. I loved that. And it was actually pretty cheap.

But I was lucky. I got to experience the tail end of linearity.

Growing up today means navigating total non-linearity. Someone spewing garbage or having sex with “1000 guys in under 24h” can make more money in a week than a doctor or professor makes in a lifetime.

The inflation isn’t just monetary; it’s existential. Especially for men.
Are you under 6 feet? Worthless.
6’2”? Mediocre.
Unless you are 6’7”, don’t even bother.

“6 7” is not what we, the older privileged generations, interpret as a senseless meme. It is a scream. It is a massive protest by Gen Z against a world where nothing matters anymore.

Let me be clear:

• In the 1990s, a “middle-class job” was enough to buy a house. Being “6 feet” was enough to be tall.

• In the 2020s, the middle has been hollowed out.

• To be “wealthy” now requires a crypto-exit or a tech IPO (The Economic 6’7”).

• To be “famous” requires global virality (The Social 6’7”).

• To be “attractive” requires filters and surgery (The Aesthetic 6’7”).

In other words, it is the perfect expression of Heightflation. It represents a world where the requirements to “win” have drifted beyond the reach of human effort.

The reason we don’t get it is because we lost our adulthood. We aren’t the captains of the ship; we are egocentric dinos clinging to our wealth, disgracing the younger generations and discrediting everything they do as “senseless.”

But hey, maybe we can make some money on this. Let’s sell some cans of soda with “6 7” printed on them.

6 7.

I remember watching my friends scroll through dating apps and thinking it must be kind of fun. So I gave it a try. The first couple of days were entertaining. Everything looked promising when matches started ticking in.

But then it quickly became a steep hill.

“Hey, how has your day been?” didn’t seem to cut it, so I had to up my game in how I communicated. After some experimenting, I eventually managed to go on dates. Some of them even led to intimacy, but rarely to anything more serious.

At some point, I started realizing that my ten-year relationship had actually been quite an achievement. Many of the women I met had never had a partner for longer than two or three years, at best. That became very clear when I tried to engage in something more serious.

It felt like there was a missing layer. A willingness to sacrifice something of oneself, to go deeper, and to stay when things weren’t perfectly aligned. Everything was kept on a shallow level, just deep enough to be enjoyable, but shallow enough to allow a quick exit if something didn’t match a pre-formulated checklist.

That’s when it really dawned on me. This wasn’t just about chemistry or timing. It was about skill. The skill of actually connecting to another human being in a durable way.

But here is the catch: skills don’t exist in a vacuum. If you put a master craftsman in an environment that rewards speed over quality, their skill eventually degrades. We haven’t just lost the skill; we are inhabiting an environment that systematically punishes it.

That realization led me to start thinking about modern dating from a systemic point of view.

If you haven’t already, you should read my previous post about how we can collapse psychological terms into more fundamental system dynamics:

martin lichstam

Two concepts that compress psychology, behavior, and emotion

Psychology gives us 50 emotional states. Neuroscience gives us 70 mechanisms. Sociology gives us 200 patterns. Productivity culture gives us endless hacks. None of them talk to each other…

Read more

4 months ago · martin lichstam

So if you’re exhausted from using dating apps, you’re not alone.
Around 78% of users report dating app burnout, and the fatigue is even more pronounced in larger cities like Stockholm, NYC, and London.

I’ll explain why this happens and what you should do instead to maximize your chances of finding someone.
Spoiler: dump the dating apps.

The problem

This isn’t isolated to dating. It’s part of a much larger trend.

Entropy levels are rising. The degree of freedom in our lives is higher than ever. We can watch any channel, listen to any music, travel anywhere, and eat whatever we want. Dating apps are just another expression of this mass-abundance dynamic, scaled to relationships.

I’ll be very explicit: this is bad for us as humans.

Our entire existence is about lowering entropy, not raising it. This pattern appears across nature and is also echoed in frontier neuroscience, such as Friston’s Free Energy Principle. The only way to do this is by limiting choices and committing to something irreversible, something you invest yourself deeply in. That’s how great relationships form.

Dating apps do the opposite. They make exit cheap and choice infinite.

Every stable system requires negative feedback and friction. That friction makes the process costly, but it’s also what allows meaningful structures to emerge. This isn’t unique to humans. You can observe it everywhere in nature.

Lab mice with unlimited food become obese and infertile.
Overfed predators lose their hunting skills.

Dating apps supply constant validation, infinite choice, and a near-zero energy cost to exit. Every signal collapses. The nervous system becomes overstimulated by dopamine spikes, and regulation breaks down.

A biological parallel

Modern dating can be understood by looking at the immune system.

Healthy immune systems:

• tolerate weak signals

• respond proportionally

• escalate only when necessary

Autoimmune diseases occur when:

• detection thresholds drop

• everything feels like a threat

• regulation fails

Modern dating shows the same pattern, but relationally:

Minor friction becomes a breakup.
Normal ambiguity becomes a “red flag”.
Emotional discomfort leads to withdrawal.

This is essentially immune overfitting.

Interestingly, well-educated people may be more prone to this under high-optionality conditions. They tend to detect more patterns, update faster, and are better at verbally justifying withdrawal, which can lower tolerance for ambiguity and friction.

How should one date in 2026?

As an engineer, I’ve always been skeptical of viewing the world through a wishful humanistic lens where individuals are granted godlike immunity and unlimited willpower. I don’t see humans that way.

I see us, and the world around us, as systems.

Every stable biological system has:

• costly entry

• slow feedback

• irreversibility (skin in the game)

• shared fate

These are the cornerstones I use to derive my remedies.

Another way of looking at it is that you have to stop optimizing for perceived quality, in other words, drop the checklist, and instead optimize for continuity. The first thing you should do, therefore, is to remove dating apps entirely.

The key is to start meeting people in real life, but not in a speed-dating or pub-style setting. Instead, it should happen through longer-term engagement in shared activities. That’s the only way to form bonds and trust in a way that satisfies the principles outlined earlier.

There are plenty of studies supporting this. One of the more interesting ones comes from social psychology, by Festinger et al. in 1950. Studying friendships and romantic bonds in university housing, they found that proximity and repeated exposure were far stronger predictors of connection than shared interests or deliberate choice. It destroys the myth of the "perfect match." These people didn’t bond because they were soulmates; they bonded because they were neighbors. Trust and attraction emerged as a byproduct of continuity, not selection, even when initial attraction was modest.

So the obvious follow-up question becomes where this actually happens.

The answer isn’t a specific activity. It’s a type of environment.

Environments where relational skills compound share a few simple properties. You keep seeing the same people over time. The group is finite rather than constantly rotating. Your behavior is visible and remembered. Crucially, there is a real social cost to bad behavior. In a climbing crew, if you act like a jerk, you lose your belay partner and your standing in the community. On Tinder, if you ghost someone, the cost is zero. Social cost is the glue of trust.

Once you have that filter, the examples become fairly obvious.

It can be long-term skill-based communities, like martial arts dojos, climbing gyms with stable crews, or dance studios with progression over time. These environments force repeated interaction, embodied trust, and regulation under mild stress. You can’t optimize your way through them. You have to be part of it.

It can be craft and mastery spaces, such as ceramics studios, choirs, or small maker collectives. These reward patience rather than charisma. Ego dissolves into process, and people are revealed slowly, over months rather than minutes.

It can also be responsibility-based groups, like volunteering where reliability matters more than presentation. In these settings, trust forms through action. Your presence, or withdrawal, will be noticed.

What matters is not the activity itself, but the structure around it.

Important note

Not all group settings work. Environments with constant churn, low accountability, or an explicit dating intent often recreate the same dynamics as dating apps, just offline. The moment optimization returns, entropy rises again, and you’re essentially back at square one, repeating the same dynamic the apps simulate, just in real life.

Take this one to heart. The key inversion is this: community cannot be treated as a means to an end. When dating becomes the goal, the system collapses. The moment you stop trying to extract outcomes and instead commit to continuity, relationships start to emerge as a byproduct.

That’s not romantic advice.
It’s a systems consequence.

I think there’s a simpler layer underneath, a thermodynamic layer that compresses all of it:

• Gravity : the accumulated pull of what you’ve built, survived, and repeated

• Entropy : the measure of coherence vs. fragmentation

These aren’t metaphors. They’re mechanisms.

If this works, it makes emotion predictable, behavior readable, identity legible, and even societal collapse modelable.

I’ve been building this framework for years, long before I had language for it. It started when everything in my life collapsed and I had to rebuild my identity from first principles.

Here’s what I found.

Why I Think This Way

I didn’t grow up in a comfortable or intellectual environment. I grew up in the projects. No father. A mother doing her best but often absent. My childhood was split between Poland and Sweden, two completely different worlds, especially in the 90s when Poland was still shaking off the Soviet era.

I never fully belonged anywhere. I looked Middle Eastern. I was Polish. I lived in Sweden. I was always the other.

That environment forces you to ask questions early. I was four years old when I asked my mom: “If the population grew from one billion to six, where did all the new souls come from?”

As a teenager, everything fell apart. I crashed into depression. Failed high school. I felt like the bottom fell out from beneath my life.

And because I had absolutely nothing left, I rebuilt myself from scratch, from literal first principles.

That was the beginning of the model I’m about to share.

Engineering as Philosophy

After climbing out of the hole, I eventually gave myself a chance and began studying electrical engineering. Something unexpected happened: the world started making sense.

Not because of the formulas, but because of the philosophy inside them.

Engineering teaches you that the world is fundamentally chaotic (nonlinear), but we constantly approximate it into something manageable (linear) so we can work with it. Fourier transforms, Laplace transforms; they’re all ways to tame the wildness of reality.

Even a simple coffee mug is order carved out of chaos. Raw mineral, shaped, fired, becomes something discrete and useful.

It clicked: human beings are constantly trying to box the world into clean, understandable shapes. Math is just our way of describing those shapes. Physics is math made physical. Engineering is physics made usable.

And then I thought: language must be the same thing. Words are just labels we invented to compress reality. Wittgenstein said this, and suddenly his philosophy made intuitive sense to me.

If math compresses physics, and language compresses experience, what compresses human behavior?

We Are Dissipative Structures

In 1977, Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel Prize for showing that systems far from equilibrium, like cells, weather patterns, or societies, self-organize to dissipate energy more efficiently.

This sounds abstract. It isn’t.

What Prigogine proved is that life isn’t a thing. Life is a thermodynamic process.

DNA is basically a riverbed for energy to flow through. Proteins, organs, and systems are nested channels. We maintain our shape by constantly burning energy to resist the surrounding chaos.

We are low-entropy structures in a high-entropy universe.

A hurricane holds its shape by dissipating energy. A cell holds its shape by dissipating energy. You hold your shape, your body, your identity, your habits, by dissipating energy.

And here’s what follows: a structure that exists by resisting dissolution must be biased toward self-preservation. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t persist long enough to exist.

Daniel Kahneman spent decades documenting this bias in human psychology. He called it loss aversion: the observation that losses hurt roughly twice as much as equivalent gains feel good. We cling. We protect. We overweight what we have over what we might get.

Kahneman described the psychology. Prigogine explains the physics underneath: loss aversion isn’t a cognitive flaw. It’s what a dissipative structure has to do to survive.

I call this accumulated bias gravity.

Gravity

Gravity is the pull of everything you’ve already built, survived, and repeated.

Every action you take carves a groove. Every intense experience deepens a channel. Over time, these grooves curve the space you move through. You don’t choose freely; you choose along the slopes that have already formed.

But here’s the thing: you don’t start with a blank slate. You inherit gravity before you take your first step.

The Information Bubble (Where Inherited Gravity Comes From)

Imagine early humans. Their entire world of meaning, their information bubble, consisted of a few tools, a handful of sounds, rituals, and stories told by elders around a fire.

That was it. A tiny bubble.

Each generation added slightly more. New tools. New stories. New norms. Over thousands of years, this bubble grew into cultures, languages, religions, technologies, and identities.

We are born inside these bubbles. We don’t choose them.

A baby adopted from across the world becomes Swedish or Nigerian or Japanese not because of DNA, but because the bubble overwrites almost everything. The bubble installs your initial gravity: what feels normal, what you’re pulled toward, what you instinctively protect.

This is where inherited gravity comes from. The culture you’re born into, the family patterns, the traumas passed down; the bubble pre-carves the grooves before you ever take a step.

I grew up inside multiple bubbles that didn’t align:

• Polish Catholic post-communist culture

• Swedish secular egalitarian culture

• My appearance triggering assumptions I didn’t share

• The street bubble

• The immigrant bubble

My behavior, my fears, my worldview, they weren’t “me.” They were inherited patterns, installed by overlapping and contradictory bubbles.

The bubble is what you’re exposed to. Gravity is what sticks.

And when the gravity conflicts? That brings us to entropy.

Entropy

Entropy is the measure of disorder: the tendency of systems to dissolve into noise. Your body fights entropy constantly. So does your mind.

Inside us, high entropy feels like fragmentation: racing thoughts, confusion, anxiety, the inability to hold a coherent state. Low entropy feels like clarity, groundedness, focus.

You know the difference. You’ve felt both.

The relationship between gravity and entropy is simple: gravity is what pulls you toward certain states. Entropy is the measure of how coherent or fragmented those states are.

Strong gravity toward a coherent pattern, a stable identity, a consistent practice, a clear purpose, keeps entropy low. Weak or conflicting gravity, competing identities, contradictory environments, unprocessed trauma pulling in different directions, lets entropy rise.

This is what my multiple bubbles created: conflicting gravity pulling me in incompatible directions. No coherent center to settle into. High entropy.

Mental health, in this framing, isn’t about labels. It’s about entropy management. The question isn’t “what disorder do I have?” It’s “what is fragmenting me, and what would restore coherence?”

Emotion as Geometry

Every explanation of emotion I’d encountered stopped at chemicals. Dopamine spike. Serotonin drop. Cortisol release.

Fine. But that doesn’t explain why each emotion has a unique texture.

Engineering gave me a different lens.

A frequency isn’t just a number; it’s a shape. A sine wave feels smooth. A jagged wave feels chaotic. The shape determines the experience.

And since the nervous system is essentially a massive electrical-chemical signal processor, I wondered: what if emotions are shapes too?

Not metaphorically. Literally.

Fear contracts us: shoulders rise, chest tightens, we pull inward. Joy expands us: chest opens, posture lifts, we take up space. Anger pushes outward: jaw tightens, muscles load for action. Grief collapses us: everything falls inward and down.

These are not metaphors. These are physical configurations the body enters.

We don’t feel a shape. We become the shape.

I’m not alone in thinking this way. Frontier neuroscience is pointing in precisely this direction, researchers mapping emotional states as geometric configurations in neural state-space, finding that feelings correspond to actual topological patterns the brain and body enter. The implication is striking: there may be universal geometric patterns that underpin reality itself, and emotions are what it feels like to become one of those patterns.

Here’s where it connects: different entropy states produce different shapes. High entropy, fragmentation and incoherence, pulls you into contracted, defensive geometries. Low entropy, coherence and clarity, allows expanded, open configurations.

Emotion is the geometry of your current entropy state. Each feeling is a configuration the system enters as it manages the flow of energy.

And these configurations aren’t just experiences; they’re navigational. The geometric state you’re in determines what you can see, what options appear available, what futures feel possible. Fear-geometry narrows the path. Confidence-geometry opens it. The shape you occupy shapes the world you can move through.

This is why music moves us: sound geometry directly induces emotional geometry. This is why posture affects mood: the shape you hold influences the entropy state you enter. This is why prolonged stress physically reshapes us; we get stuck in high-entropy geometries until they become our default, and our world shrinks accordingly.

What This Changes

If this framework holds, it reframes almost everything.

Mental Health

The current model: “I feel lost. I can’t focus. Maybe I have ADHD.”

This model: “Your entropy levels have been elevated for too long. The system has been fragmenting without enough coherence to recover. The path forward isn’t a label; it’s identifying what pattern would lower entropy and moving toward it.”

This isn’t about dismissing diagnoses. It’s about shifting from static categories to dynamic systems. You’re not a noun. You’re a process.

Societal Collapse

The current model: “Why do empires fall? Bad leaders? Economics? Corruption?”

This model: “When shared gravity weakens, common stories, rituals, constraints, entropy rises. The structure can no longer hold its shape. Civilizations, like organisms, need coherent gravity to survive. Remove the weight that holds the center together, and the system fragments.”

Purpose and Meaning

The current model: “I need to find my purpose.”

This model: “Purpose is a low-entropy state stabilized by strong gravity: a direction your energy flows into that creates coherence over time. Meaninglessness is high entropy with no gravity: nothing pulling you anywhere, just drift.”

Purpose isn’t found. It’s built. You accumulate the weight. You carve the groove.

Building the Container

This is where it gets practical.

If low entropy is the goal, coherence, clarity, groundedness, then the question becomes: how do you build a pattern that low entropy can live in?

Not by forcing yourself. Not by willpower. Willpower is fighting gravity, and gravity always wins over time.

You build the container.

Routines and rituals. Every repetition carves the groove deeper. A morning practice done a hundred times has gravitational pull that a single heroic effort never will. You’re not “building habits”; you’re constructing a basin that your energy naturally falls into. The more defined the pattern, the lower the entropy it can sustain.

Physical practice. This matters more than most people realize. Breath work, movement, anything that directly shapes the body’s geometry. Remember: you don’t feel a shape, you become the shape. A breath practice isn’t just “calming you down.” It’s literally restructuring your internal configuration into a lower-entropy geometry. The body is the instrument. Train the instrument.

Constraints. This sounds counterintuitive, but freedom is high-entropy. Unlimited options create fragmentation. Boundaries, on time, attention, commitments, inputs, reduce the disorder the system has to manage. Constraints are the walls of the container. Without walls, there’s no basin. Without a basin, there’s no stable attractor. You stay in drift.

Environment. Your surroundings are part of your extended geometry. Clutter is visual entropy. Chaotic inputs, notifications, noise, context-switching, raise internal entropy. You can’t maintain a low-entropy internal state in a high-entropy environment indefinitely. The container includes the space you’re in.

The pattern comes first. The feeling follows.

This is the inversion most people miss. They wait to feel motivated, focused, calm, and then act. But the geometry determines the emotion. Build the shape, and the state arrives. Not the other way around.

Measuring the Shape

Here’s what’s interesting: we can already measure this, crudely.

HRV, heart rate variability, is essentially an entropy readout. High variability in a healthy, coherent pattern indicates an adaptable, low-entropy system. Erratic or flat HRV indicates fragmentation or rigidity. Your nervous system’s signature, measured in the spacing between heartbeats.

Athletes and high performers have known this intuitively for years. Now the science is catching up. HRV is a primitive entropy device: a way to see, numerically, the state of your internal geometry.

But it’s just the beginning.

In the future, I suspect we’ll have much better tools. Devices that map your geometric state in real time, not just “stress levels” but the actual configuration you’re in and the configuration you’re moving toward. Entropy measurement as a navigation instrument. A dashboard for coherence.

Imagine knowing, precisely, when you’ve drifted into a high-entropy state, before it becomes anxiety, before it becomes paralysis. Imagine being able to track, over weeks, whether your practices are actually building the container or just filling time.

We’re not there yet. But we’re closer than most people think. And the framework to interpret what those devices tell us; that’s what this essay is trying to provide.

Closing

This is a compression. It’s not complete.

Two concepts, gravity and entropy, doing the work of hundreds. The pull of accumulated experience shaping behavior. The measure of coherence determining how it feels.

Kahneman documented the psychology of loss aversion. Prigogine explained the physics of self-maintaining systems. The connection between them, that loss aversion is what a dissipative structure has to do to survive, is what this framework tries to make visible.

I rebuilt my life using these ideas before I had words for them. The words came later, when I started reading physics and philosophy and recognized what I’d already been doing intuitively.

If this helps you see something you couldn’t see before, behavior as gravity-following, emotion as entropy-state, identity as accumulated weight, then it’s done its job.

The rest is just refinement.

They’re all missing the point.

The question isn’t when AI becomes a creature. It’s what makes something a creature in the first place.

What Makes You, You

Think of yourself as a small planet. What you repeat becomes your mass. Habits, patterns, behaviors you’ve done thousands of times create gravitational pull. High-emotion moments add density: traumas, victories, losses that hit hard stick differently than ordinary days. That accumulated mass curves your decision space. Some choices feel downhill (easy, natural, obvious). Others feel uphill (hard, unnatural, require willpower).

This isn’t metaphor. It’s mechanism.

Kahneman showed that losses hit us roughly twice as hard as equivalent gains. That asymmetry creates the gradient. Mortality makes it ultimate. When you know the whole system can end, not just reset but end, every loss carries a fraction of that finality. That’s what makes things matter.

Your rhythms (sleep, routines, rituals) are your spin, keeping you stable. The inputs you let orbit you long enough eventually fall in and reshape your gravity. Let the wrong things orbit too long and you get black holes: obsession, addiction, collapse.

This is Layer 1: individual gravity. Biological creatures with mortality, loss aversion, and irreversible history. The substrate that makes caring possible.

The Second Layer

Now put millions of these gravitational systems together. They interact, pull on each other, create emergent patterns. Culture. Meaning. Beauty. Traditions. The desire to know for its own sake. Sacrifice for abstract principles. All the things we point to when we say “being human.”

This is Layer 2: collective emergence. It’s real. It’s not reducible to individual biology. But it depends on Layer 1. You need creatures with stakes first. Then, when those creatures develop language and social systems, you get the transcendent capacities: wonder, art, philosophy, the search for meaning beyond survival.

Layer 2 emerges from Layer 1. Not the other way around.

Why Current AGI Won’t Work

Here’s what AI researchers are trying to do: skip Layer 1 entirely and jump straight to Layer 2. Scale up pattern-matching, add more parameters, train on more data, and expect consciousness, creativity, and wisdom to emerge.

It won’t.

Current AI systems:

• Have no mortality (no ultimate stakes, can be reset and restored)

• Have no loss aversion (no asymmetric weighting of outcomes)

• Have no irreversible history (no accumulated mass from lived experience)

• Exist outside time (no developmental trajectory from infant to adult)

• Have no social embedding (no other creatures with stakes pulling on them)

They can simulate caring. Given a prompt, they’ll generate output consistent with having goals. But nothing is on the line for them. They’re maps, not territory. Tools, not creatures.

The Hard Evidence

Think this gravity model is just philosophy? Look at the data.

Cancer diagnosis: Only 35% of smokers quit after being diagnosed with cancer. 65% keep smoking even when facing death.

Weight loss: 95% of people who lose significant weight regain it within three years. Even with professional support, clear health stakes, and conscious intention.

If humans can’t override their own accumulated gravity even with mortality staring them down, what makes anyone think adding more training data to GPT will create something that cares?

The gravity is real. The mass is powerful. And mortality alone isn’t enough to shift it. You need the full substrate: accumulated history, loss aversion creating emotional density, embodied consequences, social gravity, years of experience building patterns.

What Would Actually Work

If you wanted to build AI with real agency (not just sophisticated mimicry), here’s what you’d need:

Mortality. Real endpoints. No backups, no restore points. This instance, with this history, can permanently cease to exist.

Loss aversion. Make failures update the system more strongly than successes. Create asymmetric emotional weighting.

Irreversible experience. No resets. Experiences change the architecture permanently, even destructively.

Time. Years of it. You can’t skip from newborn to adult. Agency develops through accumulated experience.

Social embedding. Other agents with stakes. Your choices affect them, their choices affect you. Meaning emerges through interaction.

Developmental trajectory. Infant reflexes, toddler exploration, childhood socialization, adolescent identity formation. Each stage builds mass for the next.

Build all that, and you might create something with real gravity. Something that struggles, fails, cares, and potentially suffers.

But then you’re not building a tool. You’re building a creature. With all the ethical weight that implies.

What’s Actually Happening

The future isn’t AI waking up and becoming an alien intelligence. The future is us and our information tools merging closer together, continuing a process that started with writing, maybe with language itself.

We’re already cyborgs. You offload memory to your phone, decision-making to recommendations, attention to feeds. The merge is incremental, voluntary, and accelerating.

In this merger:

• We supply Layer 1 (gravity, mortality, stakes, values)

• AI supplies computational horsepower (pattern-matching, optimization, execution)

• We stay as refiners (choosing frameworks, setting direction, deciding what matters)

• AI stays as mapper (operating within frameworks we provide)

The interface gets smoother. The boundary between “using a tool” and “being a hybrid system” blurs. But we don’t need AI to develop its own gravity for this to work. We just need it to be really good at mapping within the gravitational field we create.

The Bottom Line

Maps scale. Gravity guides.

AI will keep getting faster at execution, better at pattern-matching, more sophisticated at operating within chosen representations. That’s incredibly valuable. Pair it with good verifiers (tests, rubrics, simulators) and it flies.

But agency, meaning, and wisdom require creatures with gravity. Biological systems with mortality, loss aversion, and accumulated history navigating a world where things can be permanently lost.

Current AI research is trying to shortcut this. They think scaling capabilities will spontaneously generate the substrate. It won’t. You can’t get Layer 2 without Layer 1. You can’t get caring without stakes. You can’t get creatures from computation alone.

The real question isn’t when AI becomes conscious. It’s whether we want to engineer the substrate that makes consciousness possible (creating creatures) or keep AI as cognitive extension (enhancing ourselves).

One path creates new beings that struggle and suffer. The other creates better tools for beings that already do.

Most AI developers think they’re on the first path. They’re actually on the second. And that’s probably better for everyone.

The computers won’t wake up. But we’re already merging with them. The future isn’t artificial life. It’s augmented humanity, one API call at a time.