Nature is Dissipative

Waste may mean different to different people. To vegans, rearing animals for food is a waste (of life); to non-vegans, life living as a vegan itself is a waste. In this article, I would mean waste in a more general sense but even that might mean different in future. For example, Noble Peace Prize's denial to Mahatma Gandhi is wasteful now since so many later prize lauretes got inspired by him.

Franz Kafka's work was considered a waste until he became a super-star after he died. Kafka is the best way to begin this idea. He became popular for a litrerary figure called Kafkaesque which is quite coherent with this article. Some men compared him with Dante. This is despite the fact that he burned 90% of his work before he died and the rest of his work, he gave to his friend saying - "I could not destroy these, would you please do it?". Thankfully, his friend did not agree and published his work, giving us Kafkaesque. What a waste, right?

But he is not the only one with a life like this, Vincent Van Gogh had a similar life. He started painting very late in his life and he supposedly shot himself in chest, at the age of 37. He lived his life being dissatisfied with his work and thought he is terrible at painting. Whole of his life he awaited appreciation for his paintings, probably a factor in his suicide. Ramanujan, One of the greatest mathematicians, died at the age of 32 while seeking acknowledgement for his work. Évariste Galois, another great mathematician, died at the age of 20 by when he had already founded the fundamentals of encryption science. He died in a duel fight. Mozart died at the age of 31 in poverty and thinking that he could never fill the shoes of Beethoven. Steve Jobs was kept 12 years away from Apple before he went on to release iconic products which turned it into the most valuable company before he died. Simon and Garfunkel produced some of my favourite songs. They broke up their duo shortly after the success and never wrote a song together. They composed only 5 albums for which they won 10 Grammy Awards. This list is a string from a bottom-less well of waste. It sucks to think all of this.

Nature is dissipative. Beethoven lived a full-sized life and produced many great works but only some of them were recreated and it is almost 200 years since he died. (Also true for mozart.) We simply don't have apetite to consume so much music. India made so much effort to provide education to poor children and then Coronavirus hit and now it is feared that one full generation may miss on education, simply because poor parents dropped their kids out of school and are making them to work in fields for money. Think of it, We sleep one third of our life off, pay a large fraction of money as tax, keep connection with so many people until we finally let go of them and so on. Nature is inherently dissipative; it plays survival-of-the-fittest game all the time. Chaos is naturally ensued and conquering every extra percent in control requires exponentially more resources. All of this to say - it is okay to be wasted. It is okay to dissipate some money, time, passion, life etc. It is okay to make mistakes because one way or the other, nature will snatch some part of you. This is a firefly in the dark.

The End