Entropy: the friend you never fought with and still lost
Entropy, used loosely, is the idea that things drift apart without upkeep, tried here on a college friendship that faded after a job move and a rented flat's small repairs.
- everyday-life
- autopilot
- hermes
Meera scrolls to her last chat with Sana, her closest friend from college in Nagpur. The last message is a birthday sticker from March. Before that, a "HBD" from the year before. They never had a fight. Sana moved to Pune for a job, Meera stayed, and each of them kept saying "kal pakka call karti hoon".
What entropy is
Entropy is a word from physics. Left alone, an ordered thing slides towards disorder, and it takes steady effort to hold it in shape. The idea comes from the physicist Rudolf Clausius and the second law of thermodynamics. Here it is used loosely, as a picture and not as a science lesson: a friendship, like a rented flat, does not need a villain to fall apart. It only needs to be left alone.
The example, step by step
Look at how the daily calls faded. Nobody decided anything.
- In college, the friendship ran on free upkeep. Same canteen, same bus, same corridor.
- After the job move, the upkeep stopped being free. A call now needed a gap in the day, and each of them waited for the other to find it.
- The calls turned into messages, the messages into birthday wishes, the wishes into a sticker.
Now think of a rented flat. A dripping tap, a loose cupboard hinge, a patch of damp. Each is a five-minute fix on the day it starts. Ignore all three for a year and you are calling a plumber, a carpenter and a painter, and the landlord has an opinion. The big repair was never one event. It was many small ones that nobody did.
The friendship works the same way. The gap of two years feels too big to cross with one call, so the call keeps getting postponed, which makes the gap bigger. Small upkeep, done often, beats one big reset, because the reset gets harder to start every month you wait.
Where the idea stops
A metaphor is not a law of friendship. Some friendships rest quietly for years and pick up in one evening, and that is fine. Entropy also does not say who is at fault. Sana is not careless and Meera is not cold. The model does not hand out blame; it only points at the missing upkeep. Do not use it to feel guilty about every contact you have let slide. Pick the ones you miss.
One thing to try
Today, pick one friend you miss. Set a two-minute timer and call, with no agenda beyond "I was thinking of you". Put a reminder in your phone for the same day next week and call again. If they do not pick up, leave a short voice note and still keep the second reminder. The aim is small and regular, not long and rare.
Each Sunday: one mental model and one real decision to try it on. Find more in the library at /models.
One model a week.
Each Sunday: one mental model and one real decision to try it on. One click stops it, and the list is never sold or shared.