On the Nature of Social Connections in an Entropic Universe

As I was deepening my understanding of physics whilst also venturing into the world of philosophical thought, it prompted me to stop and think for a moment. I realised that what we accept as truth in the realm of physics, also applies to our relationships.

Hear me out.

Chaos & Unpredictability

Beginning with pioneering work such as Edward Lorenz’s in the 1960s, scientists began developing what would eventually become known as Chaos Theory, the popular image of which is none other than the famous "Butterfly Effect". The idea of Chaos wasn't used the way we use it in our everyday vernacular, though. In science it has a very specific meaning: it said that a system that follows clear deterministic rules with nothing random in them can eventually produce drastically different trajectories due to extreme sensitivity to tiny differences in initial conditions, thus becoming practically unpredictable.

This idea might seem like a nerd's wet dream in a physics hall. But it is far more applicable to our day-to-day social connections than it might seem at first sight. Imagine the following. You meet two new people and you all three like each other so you decide to become friends. However, in this trio, you know that even though you've met both on the same day, you cannot predict where your connection with either will go. Differences in the commonalities you share with either of them, as well as other factors such as where the trajectories of each of their lives are headed — one may experience grief and come to you, rendering you closer to this person than you are to the other one — accumulate and compound, thus representing a striking example of the Butterfly Effect. Tiny changes in how your connection got off with two different people can cause you to have a stronger bond with one of them compared to the other.

Think about it this way: we cannot rewind two people’s lives, change one microscopic variable, and expect their relationship to follow exactly the same trajectory. Those tiny changes can compound, producing ever-larger divergences in trajectory from the one we might've otherwise extrapolated.

But to understand why the concept of Chaos-induced unpredictability is so crucial to relationships, we have to understand the overarching direction that the universe is heading towards — with one important caveat.

Entropy — From Order into Disorder

The concept of entropy owes its root to the physicists and mathematicians of the 19th century. In 1865, Rudolf Clausius coined the term entropy, and said it tended towards a maximum — that entropy, whatever it was, had to always be increasing. This ambiguity was laid to rest in the late 1870s, when a physicist named Ludwig Boltzmann came up with a statistical definition of entropy: the measure of disorder in the universe.

His famous equation S = klogW was essentially a fancy way of saying that there are far more ways for things to be messy or disordered, than there are for them to be tidy or ordered. The philosophical implication of this scientific idea was simple: left to itself, the universe will always get messier. This discovery blew the final whistle on the universe's true nature and revealed its ultimate, inexorable move from order to disorder. That was the grand lesson the universe was teaching us which I believe applies to more than just physics.

Change and degradation are unavoidable. From a cup of tea losing its heat to the surroundings, to a dropped jug shattering into pieces, to the wear and tear and eventual obsolescence of products we use, to a burning star running through its finite fuel supply, all the way to a human life giving out its final breath. The physics equation tells us that even the universe itself must one day reach a point of maximum entropy — maximum disorder. It says that even the universe itself is destined to one day die. Disorder is the ultimate fate of all things – and not even the universe itself is exempt from it. So why should our relationships be?

If the process of change and degradation are woven into the very fabric of the universe itself, why do we treat change within human relationships as though something has necessarily gone wrong?

Heraclitus: The Consonance of Strife & Stability

The pre-socratic Greeks surely had some wild notions and philosophical ideas, and a prime example of this breed of ruminant humans is the philosopher Heraclitus.

Heraclitus prodded us to think about an idea which might seem counterintuitive at first glance, but which — as you'll witness in a moment — resonated with the ideas of chaos, entropy and change many a millennia before science had found names for them. He averred a philosophy which will reveal to us how strife and opposition in our social connections should not be viewed as unfortunate interruptions of order, but rather, as constitutive of the processes that cultivate order and maintain stability on a grander scale.

This ancient fellow had posited the notion that stability can exist not despite change, but because of it. However much our limited instincts would like to convince us that order and stability require an absence of change, the reality is that this runs counter to how the universe actually works. To illustrate this point, we need not venture very far. Our own bodies serve as a prime example of a system that stays stable because change moves through it. You eat, breathe, grow and your body metabolizes. Cells die and get replaced. Your body is an ongoing process rather than a lump of matter frozen in a particular state. Yet from a macroscopic standpoint, you remain more or less the same, not despite but because of the ever-present change at the microscopic level.

A similar picture holds true in our social relationships as well. The idea of entropy was that isolated macroscopic systems with no extraneous or outside influences are predisposed, even destined, towards disorder and decay. But living things aren’t isolated systems — neither are our social connections. And this brings us to the caveat I'd mentioned hereinbefore.

Our social connections are not necessarily destined for disorder and degradation. We're not necessarily doomed to lose our social connections before our lifetimes are over. But of course, maintaining relational closeness requires work: attention; time; repair; effort; conversation; shared experience; forgiveness; adaptation. But we do have the chance to put energy into our connections and thus keep them afloat. Without an ongoing energy input, however, the structure of the friendship is prone to the same rulebook that governs the entire universe: entropy — the insidious move from order to disorder and decay.

When you think about it, the only reason our social systems and relationships are able to maintain remarkably stable local structure is precisely because energy is continually being put into them. However it is important to note that this stability exists on the macroscopic level only when there exists occasional, minute conflicts on the microscopic scale. Imagine if your friend does something that annoys you or upsets you, and yet you never voice that out or vent about it. At some point, the bond between the two of you will begin to decay. Not necessarily because of what your friend was doing — he might've not been doing anything horribly wrong — but actually because you had stayed silent for far too long that resentment and grudges inevitably built up. Your rationale was that by avoiding conflict with your friend, you'd be maintaining peace and preserving order within it. Such a notion is at best ostensibly sound, but Heraclitus shows us it is indeed most fallacious. By internalising the disorder, we don't eliminate it — we only create the space for it to accumulate and eventually explode in our faces. To maintain a stable connection on a macroscopic level, one must therefore allow fluctuations — tiny bouts of conflict — to take place in the relationship on the microscopic level when needed. Relational harmony is not achieved by eliminating tension; but can arise from properly structured conflict.

This is the heart of Heraclitean philosophy. The idea that strife, conflict, even war, is not inherently bad, but rather, a core and essential component of how peace can be cultivated. It reveals how conflict not only is not antithetical to stability, but that tension and strife are in fact essential — on the microscopic level — to maintain a grand structure of harmony and order.

Luckily, Heraclitus gave us two simple yet potent metaphors: the bow and lyre.

The famous Heraclitean imagery of the bow and the lyre serve as his own primary examples through which he demonstrates how harmony, in fact, arises through opposing tension. A bow works because its string and frame pull against one another; while a lyre produces music because its strings are under tension. Remove the tension and you don’t get perfect peace — you get a useless bow and a silent lyre.

So the profound lesson for us from Heraclitean philosophy is that order does not necessarily mean the absence of opposition; sometimes order is created by balanced opposition. After all, The bow is harmonious because it is under tension.

As Heraclitus showed us, stability may sometimes even require change, instead of the instinctual notion that change and stability are incompatible with one another. And his famous saying "Upon those stepping into the same rivers, different waters flow" represents the quintessential example of his philosophy. The idea is not that nothing remains the same, quite the contrary: something can remain the same precisely while its components change. The water passing your feet right now is not the water that will pass them five seconds later, and yet, it remains the same river. And a river's very existence depends upon water continually flowing. If the water stopped permanently, the river would die and all life within it would perish. This is not dissimilar to how our social connections function. It is the continual variation, the fluctuations at the microscopic level in our connections, that keeps the relationship dynamic and alive at the macroscopic scale; the connection is ever-changing, and yet, it is this quality that keeps it stable.

Your Social Playlist & Songs of the Soul

Heraclitus looked at the lyre and saw that harmony required tension. Thousands of years later, we all have songs in our playlists that we don't listen to as often as we used to, or maybe not at all anymore. One might argue, perhaps, that these songs have ceased to resonate with us. We listen to them again and discover that they no longer speak to us in quite the same way. Songs which once moved us like nothing prior, now barely register in our hearts.

What's interesting here is that the songs are still the same. The rhythm that once electrified you is still intact; the lyrics that spoke to your heart are still flowing; and the beat that moved you beyond imagination is still there. The song hasn't changed — you have. The song is still the same song you'd listened to that very first time — you're not the same person who had felt it resonate with you.

Naturally, we never find fault in this, we never judge ourselves for not finding a certain song as resonant or relatable as we'd once felt about it. And yet, when it comes to our relationships, we mistake loyalty for unwavering stability and unfaltering closeness.

Of course, people aren't songs. However, their souls play a certain tune with which ours may resonate. The crucial difference is that while songs in our playlists remain frozen in the form in which we first encountered them, people, on the other hand, change alongside us. Their mindsets change; their ambitions, fears, values, priorities, circumstances, even their way of showing love may change. Unlike the songs in our playlists, the song of another human soul is itself still changing while we listen to it. Consequently, this makes human resonance even more precarious and fragile: both the music and the listener are changing simultaneously. And here, Heraclitus’s river comes flowing back into view. In one sense, we never encounter precisely the same person twice, because neither they nor we remain still long enough for that to happen. Your friend may remain the same friend, just as the river remains the same river — but the waters flowing through you both is alive and ever-changing. Same river; different waters. Same friend; different songs of the soul.

And if two people are perpetually changing to begin with, then how on Earth or in the high heavens could we honestly expect them to maintain exactly the same relationship to one another indefinitely?

The notion that distance automatically means diminished affection should come to be vehemently refuted. You may still love a certain friend with the same sincerity and depth that you used to, but not talk as often or meet as frequently. The change in closeness doesn't have to be caused by one giant catastrophic event, either. The connection may have simply slowly evolved in such a direction that you're no longer each other's primary confidants, perhaps because one or both of you have entered a different phase of life. Perhaps you've moved cities, entered college, begun work or gotten married. Perhaps your interests have shifted. Here, chaos theory enters the room and we witness the Butterfly Effect in action: a tiny change in either of your life trajectories may cause significant changes later on. Again, radically different eventual trajectories need not begin with radically different initial events. Maybe the two of you once spoke every evening but eventually you began to speak only weekly—not because either betrayed the other, but because hundreds of minute divergences accumulated. Of course, while none of this constitutes grounds for neglecting — let alone abandoning — the relationship, they might help explain why a connection might lose the spotlight it had once relished. This is not necessarily a sign of a fault in the friendship; nor does it have to be anybody's mistake. Sometimes... life just happens.

Another point is that we also tend to confuse the intensity of a connection with its genuineness. However, much like that song that had helped you go through that breakup, a friend might've also been enormously important between ages 19 and 23 when you were still reeling from a major loss in your life; yet, that same friend could barely be present at 30. The explanation isn't that betrayal has taken place, nor that you somehow are no longer as interesting. A friend may have simply been closer to you during a period of heightened vulnerability when you'd really needed them. Yet that does not mean those four years were somehow counterfeit. You connected with their soul and enjoyed its tune — no one can deny that. And just because you didn't need to listen to its song ten years later, doesn't render those earlier years any less meaningful. It's just that sometimes people can belong profoundly to one chapter of our lives without needing to inhabit every chapter thereafter.

And this is where loyalty gets confused with permanent closeness. Sure, I may be loyal to my friends, but that doesn't mean that my connection to them will remain the same all the time, forever and ever. The degree of closeness I experience with them—how often we communicate or meet up—can and is meant to vary over time. Remember that microscopic fluctuations in the relationship are essential for macroscopic, long-term stability. Much like that song which helped console you right after you had that breakup or went through that heartbreak, a year later, it has ceased to resonate with who you became as it once used to; not because the song has changed, but because you have — as you are meant to.

We retrospectively evaluate relationships according to whether they survived. But change is not the same thing as failure. If we come to evaluate a friendship which lasted thirty years as "Successful", but then gripe how one which lasted three years before fading had somehow "Failed" then we'd be well positioned to be accused of hypocrisy. We don’t apply that criterion to music. So why approach social connections with such a pre-deterministic, ungracious mentality?

Nobody comes and says "That song comforted me through the worst six months of my life, but I haven’t listened to it since 2021, therefore I don't think it was really meaningful" — that would be stark raving absurd! The song's meaning was partly situational; it met the person you were then. And perhaps people sometimes do too. There seems to be something horridly unfair, even blindly brutal, about demanding that every meaningful relationship justify its past by surviving unchanged into the future.

So perhaps all these drifted social connections that you've spent many a sleepless night grieving were not failed experiments, after all. Not every friendship that drifts apart is a friendship that failed. As both the science of physics and the philosophical muses of Heraclitus have clearly demonstrated, unpredictable change, unavoidable conflict, fluctuating closeness and even eventual separation are not necessarily evidence that the relationship was defective. Though sometimes we are indeed responsible for friendships drifting: we fail to communicate; we neglect our friendships; we hold grudges; we may say hurtful things or simply stop making an effort and thus, we may slowly erode the love we feel and the connection we share with our friend.

Permanence doesn’t have to be the receipt of proof that a relationship is worth what we thought it was. A song doesn't become meaningless simply because you eventually stop playing it. Similarly, perhaps some people remain part of our musical library of relationships without being in our favourites playlist anymore. And who knows... perhaps one day while you're scrolling through old favourites, they'll come resonating back on max volume and become closer to your heart than they ever were.