Why Things Fall Apart Without Constant Effort

You clean your desk. A week later, it's cluttered again. You didn't decide to make it messy—it just happened. Relationships drift apart when you stop reaching out. Teams lose alignment when you skip the standups. Code rots when no one maintains it.

This isn't entropy as metaphor. This is actual physics.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that disorder always increases in a closed system. Order—neat desks, aligned teams, working software—is statistically improbable. There are vastly more ways for things to be messy than organized. Without continuous energy input, everything drifts toward the most probable state: chaos.

Lewis Carroll captured it perfectly in Through the Looking-Glass: the Red Queen tells Alice, "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." That's not a whimsical fantasy. That's thermodynamics.

The instrument below lets you feel this. Watch the particles drift from their ordered positions. Click to inject work—they'll snap back briefly, then immediately start dispersing again. You can never "solve" disorder. You can only keep paying the maintenance tax.

Try it: Let it decay, then click to restore order. Feel how quickly things fall apart again.

S

Entropy

Time

Order 100%
Entropy 0.00
Work Rate 0
State Ordered
Click to add work
8
50

The Red Queen Effect

Order requires continuous repair. Without constant work input, every coordinated system decays toward maximum entropy. This is the Second Law applied to coordination.

Click anywhere on the canvas to inject work. Watch the particles briefly return to order—then immediately begin dispersing again. You must keep running just to stay in place.

The Red Queen told Alice: "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." This is the physics of organizational maintenance, relationship upkeep, and institutional preservation.

The Physics

Entropy always increases in closed systems. Coordination creates local order by exporting entropy to the environment—but this requires continuous energy. Stop the work, and disorder wins. Every organization is fighting thermodynamics.

Law 3

Coordination Overhead: The work required to maintain coordination grows superlinearly with system size. Bigger systems need disproportionately more maintenance just to stay coherent.