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.

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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.