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There is a law that governs not just physical systems but human ones: left alone, things fall apart. Disorder increases. Structures that once held meaning lose it. Energy dissipates. In thermodynamics, this is called entropy: the tendency of closed systems to move from order toward chaos. But the principle extends far beyond physics. It describes what happens to a mind that stops questioning itself, to a friendship that goes untended, to a culture that loses its capacity for self-examination. The question is not whether entropy applies to how we think, relate, and change. It does. The question is what counters it.
The answer is agency, but not agency understood as mere willfulness or independence. Agency, properly understood, is critical thinking in action. It is the capacity to examine one’s situation, question its apparent fixity, and choose to act on it rather than be acted upon by it. It is what bell hooks called the practice of freedom: the refusal of the passive role of object in someone else’s story and the claim of the active role of subject in one’s own. Sustained, it is the only force reliably capable of reversing entropic drift in human life.
The Entropy of Understanding
Knowledge, in a person and in a culture, decays. The insight that was alive a decade ago grows brittle. The framework that once illuminated experience becomes the lens that distorts it. Certainties accumulate. Questions stop being asked not because they have been answered, but because they become uncomfortable, because asking requires admitting that what we thought we knew may not hold.
This is epistemic entropy: the slow hardening of understanding into dogma, the conversion of tools for thinking into substitutes for it. It happens to individuals throughout their lives: the gradual replacement of genuine curiosity with the performance of expertise, the moment when a person stops being someone who is learning and becomes someone who already knows.
The drift is comfortable. Received frameworks do not demand the energy that open questions do. To live with uncertainty is costly; to resolve it prematurely is a relief. The dominant model of education functions transactionally: knowledge is delivered to students who are expected to receive it, file it, and return it on demand. The model is efficient at producing certainty and catastrophic at producing thought. Most institutions, whether schools, communities of practice, or companies, are organized in roughly this way. They reward the correct answer over the genuine question, the accepted interpretation over the disruptive one. The result is not stability but stagnation dressed as stability.
The anti-entropic stance is older than any of its formulations: a willingness to remain a learner, to treat one’s current understanding not as an achievement to be defended but as a position to be tested. To refuse the role of expert is what keeps a mind alive.
The Entropy of Creativity
Creativity might seem immune to entropy. It feels like it should be self-sustaining, renewable by definition. But anyone who has lived inside a creative practice long enough knows the opposite to be true. Ideas lose freshness on the shelf. Aesthetic sensibilities become habits. What once felt like discovery now feels like repetition. The creative act, if left to its own momentum, tends toward the safe and the predictable, toward the already-known.
The entropic forces here are particular. Taste, paradoxically, becomes a liability. The more refined one’s sense of what works, the stronger the pull toward what has worked before. The same sensibility that enables originality begins to constrain it: every new impulse filtered through the accumulated authority of past judgment. This is why so many creative lives follow the same arc: early vitality, a fertile middle period, and then a long tail of diminishing strangeness, the person still technically capable but drawing from an ever-shallower well.
Imagination is not a free-floating gift but a discipline, and it requires the same habits of mind as critical inquiry: the willingness to ask what is not here, what is being excluded, what assumptions are shaping what feels possible. The person who has stopped asking those questions has stopped exercising the very faculty that made them creative. They have, in a quiet way, stopped thinking.
You cannot make something new from an unexamined position. You can only reproduce what is already in the room. Agency in creativity is the willingness to turn the critical gaze on one’s own practice, to ask what assumptions are structuring the work, to notice which constraints feel natural because they are useful and which feel natural because they have simply become invisible.
This is not about productivity. It is not about doing more. It is about maintaining the stance of someone who is still looking, who has not yet decided that the edges of their current vision are the edges of what is possible.
The Entropy of Relationships
Of all the forms entropy takes in human life, the relational form may be the most insidious, because it is the hardest to see while it is happening. Relationships, whether between friends, between intimates, or between a person and their community, do not typically decay through conflict. They decay through inattention. The dangerous condition is not rupture but drift.
What erodes is the quality of contact. Over time, people stop genuinely encountering each other and begin relating instead to the model they have accumulated: the cached impressions, the settled assumptions, the shorthand that was once efficient and has become a substitute for presence. You think you know what someone means before they finish speaking. You think you know who they are, what they need, and where their limits are. This economy of prior knowledge feels like intimacy but is often its opposite. It is the relationship on autopilot, coasting on its own inertia.
Trust is particularly vulnerable to this kind of erosion. It is not a fixed asset; it is renewed, or it thins. The renewal happens through small, repeated acts: honesty about what is actually happening, the willingness to ask the uncomfortable question, the choice to stay present when presence is costly. When those acts stop, trust does not immediately collapse. It quietly hollows out. The relationship retains its form while losing its substance.
What is lost when attention lapses is presence, the capacity to set aside the cached version of someone and meet what is actually in front of you. Love, understood not as sentiment but as practice, is the active commitment to do this: to choose, again and again, to see the person rather than the idea of them you have been carrying around. Without that practice, what passes between people is only a signal, efficient and predictable, and increasingly hollow. With it, even small interactions become acts of recognition. The relational anti-entropy is the same as the cognitive one: presence, inquiry, and the refusal to stop being curious about the people you are close to.
The Entropy of Transformation
Personal change is perhaps where entropy exerts its most intimate force. People decide to be different (more honest, less reactive, more present, more willing to be uncertain), and they mean it. For a time, the decision holds. And then, gradually, the old patterns reassert themselves. The familiar self reconstitutes around the edges of the new one. The language of change persists while the underlying shape returns.
This is not a weakness. It is entropy. The self, like any complex system, tends toward its established state in the absence of continuous energy input. Transformation is not an event with an endpoint. It is a sustained act of applied attention against a powerful gravitational pull toward the prior equilibrium.
What makes this harder is that the resistance is often invisible. We do not experience ourselves reverting. We experience ourselves responding to circumstances, making reasonable choices, and being realistic. The entropic force does not announce itself as conservatism or fear. It presents as common sense.
Genuine learning always involves a kind of self-disturbance. Real transformation cannot be delivered from outside; it has to emerge from within, from the willingness to look at an embodied sense of meaning rather than given media about it.
A Note on Practice
The argument here is that agency is what counters entropy in every domain it touches. There is no domain right now in which that question is more urgent than artificial intelligence.
Most people encounter AI the way most people encounter any new condition imposed from above: as a given, something happening to them, a force whose shape they have not been invited to examine. The risk is not that the technology is bad. It is that a generation will accept it as natural before having the chance to look at it critically, to ask what is being assumed, what is being foreclosed, what becomes possible once the inheritance is treated as something to be questioned rather than absorbed.
Critical Business School’s new in-person AI Literacy program was built for exactly this. It treats AI not as a tool to be adopted but as a system to be understood, questioned, and deliberately shaped: the practice of freedom applied to the most consequential technology of the moment. It is for people who would rather be the subject of their own engagement with AI than its object.