The Engine
How to endure? Life is a tax. To maintain a structure against entropy, one must pay a constant energetic price.
The Gradient
The Civil War
According to Carnot's Second Law, no work can be produced without a difference in temperature. Equilibrium is the end of the engine. To act is to maintain a "civil war" between two poles (Hot/Cold, Plus/Minus). The energy does not come from the poles, but from the tension between them.
The Pump
Metabolic Cost
Health is not free; it is an active expense. The Sodium-Potassium Pump ($Na^+/K^+$) consumes 30% of your body's energy just to keep the inside distinct from the outside. Fatigue is not a failure; it is the bill for negentropy. We do not rest to recover; we work to remain distinct.
Anxiety
The Larsen Effect
Anxiety is not a lack of strength, but an excess of power without an outlet. It is a feedback loop (Larsen effect) where the output signal re-enters the input. The mind becomes an engine racing in neutral. The solution is not to calm down (which fails), but to engage a gear (mechanical action) to consume the fuel.
Acceleration
Turgescence
Like a fire hose that becomes hard as steel only when water flows through it at high speed, modern structures rely on "Turgescence". We no longer build with stone (bones), but with speed (flux). Just-In-Time economics and digital lives hold together only because they move fast. Stop the flow, and the structure collapses.
The Rule
Work Hardening
In metallurgy, hammering metal makes it harder but more brittle (Work Hardening). Similarly, a bureaucracy that adds rules to correct errors becomes rigid. It gains "Hardness" but loses "Toughness" (plasticity). A system without "play" (mechanical tolerance) inevitably breaks like glass under shock.