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When I started my first compost pile, the most helpful line I read among the several books and articles I pored over went something like this: “Everything breaks down, eventually.” In other words, you can learn all about balancing greens and browns, optimal pile temperatures, and all the things you’re NOT supposed to add to compost… but in the end, you can’t really screw it up, only slow it down.
While this little spot of wisdom empowered me to finally try my hand at composting without overcomplicating things, it also reflects a much broader truth. And that’s the tendency for all things to disintegrate, devolve, and decay.
In other words, entropy. The tendency for everything to move towards disorder, a concept central to the second law of thermodynamics.
On our recent vacation to warmer weather, I watched my dad and, soon after, my son take charge of stacking and organizing an unwieldy pile of pool tubes as lazy river goers came and went, taking or adding tubes to the otherwise hodge podge pile. The natural order was increasing disorganization, tubes falling into the water and floating around personless, and more tumbling around on the deck.
But the antidote to entropy is work. When someone stood deckside and handled the incoming and outgoing tube flux, things remained ordered and neat rather easily. Pool goers even started bringing their tubes back to the stack themselves, one person’s work inspiring others to make a small effort that helped the whole system run more smoothly. Sounds dull, but it was actually rather fascinating to watch.
And such is the rest of our lives, including managing our money. Order requires deliberate inputs – effort, work – because the natural tendency of anything is eventual chaos. In other words, disorder is normal.
Your money will never manage itself into a neat and orderly system. Instead, money will seem to spend itself and finances devolve into chaos – because that’s the natural order of all things with time. This is especially true on vacation.
Understanding this reality is important because it means financial turbulence is not bad luck or unique to any one of us.
You aren’t ever “bad” with money. You’re simply up against the reality of nature.
It’s what happens to any system in motion that goes long enough without some effort to straighten things out – whether a drawer in your kitchen, the tubes on the pool deck, or the state of your checking and savings accounts.
People with smooth running finances, therefore, have systems that provide repeated straightening of some kind – like checking on your spending rate week to week, routinely evaluating habits that spend more than you like, and keeping tabs on the progress of investments.
The secret isn’t to evade entropy (impossible), it’s simply to acknowledge it exits, and keep good systems in place that balance its ever-present effects on your life and money.
Entropy was a troubling and beautiful concept that lay at the heart of much human toil and sorrow. Everything, especially life, fell apart. Order was a boulder to be rolled uphill. The kitchen would not tidy itself.
Ian McEwan
I hope you enjoyed this edition of Under 2, an email series designed to share quick bites of wisdom to empower your financial journey (while keeping it short). Be sure to sign-up below to get these messages in your inbox.
All for now,
Lindsey