The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men Wind Up to be the Same

I wrote this article a short while ago, to be published in The Hindu Young World, but it was rejected, due to it's depressing subject matter. 

The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men Wind Up to be the Same

If you thought I was going to deliver some useful information in the course of this article, you are sadly mistaken. Using knowledge I gleaned from topics ranging from Statistical Mechanics to Pokemon, I have put together common ideas that rule our universe, and highlight the pitifully small role played by us in it's path. Using flawed knowledge and faulty logic, I have reached an inevitable and depressing conclusion. 

The desire for constancy is a natural urge of mankind. It is what made hunter gathers settle down and become farmers, it is what prevents us from changing our nationality every day, it is what prevents meat eating tigers from becoming pure vegans. I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Change is the nature of the universe. I find it too big a coincidence that the base desires of the living beings that populate such a place go Against it's constitution. Upon further analysis, I found that it is not change, per se , that scares us, but the passage of time. This is where my knowledge in Pokemon comes into play.  A Pokemon changing it's form, or evolving, is  not upsetting to the trainer. On the contrary, it elevates him or her to a new plane of joy. The hours spent levelling up and fighting battles and using items finally yield a beautiful and bountiful reward. What does worry the trainer is the fact that he had to bunk a day of school to do this, in other words he is afraid of the consequences of time passing. 

Some basic knowledge of physics tells us as much. The very definition of time in physics is weird and tough to wrap your head around. Time is defined as the direction in which disorderliness or entropy increases. This makes sense. Left to itself, the heat stored in a hot tea cup is more likely to mix with the surrounding air than stay within the confines of the cup. Or to put it technically, a system is going to get more mixed up and messy unless you exert some energy to counter this. In the previous analogy, you could reheat the cup. I am getting back to the topic at hand. Sentient beings fear the future because of the disorderliness. The sheer number of possible outcomes is mind boggling. This is why it easy to think about what happened yesterday, and impossible to think of what will happen tomorrow. Yesterday was a lot more orderly than tomorrow. It all comes back to the basic principle - we don't what happens in the passage of time and we always fear the unknown. Ludwig Boltzmann, who did pioneering work in the field of Thermodynamics once commented 

" I have realised that I am but a lone being struggling against the wave of time. " Weeks after reaching this upsetting epiphany, he committed suicide. 

What I have come to know is that, from a completely objective point of view, we should not exist. The entropy of the universe should never have reached a point where it allowed for planets or even life to form, much less sentient beings questioning the purpose of their existence. From a cosmological perspective all we are is a tiny blip of people trying to reduce the entropy of the small region we inhabit. That's all we are. We dream of illusions like control and plans. This brings me to my title, for the universe literally pooh-poohs our us and our plans. What I find seriously funny is that despite all this, we have the guts to think of how amazing and great we are. Do we not extol our virtues in spades, should even the slightest opportunity arise? For instance, the pathetic story of a boy who wrote an article not worth the paper it was written on admired his "skill" and "wisdom" in doing so comes to mind. I still don't know the purpose of this article, but it appears I am out of paper anyway.