Beyond Fractured Thoughts: Achieving Mental Harmony in a World of Entropy

Your mind and thoughts are fractured by entropy.

Reducing entropy allows you to provide order in your mind.

Providing order in your mind allows you to focus.

Refining your focus creates flow.

The process of creating order out of entropy is enjoyable.

Explore your mind, order your thoughts, find your flow.

Entropy, by its very nature, leads to fractured thoughts and a disorganized mind.

As a measure of disorder and unpredictability, it seeps into our thought processes, breaking them down into fragmented parts and causing a lack of focus.

This constant bombardment of entropic stimuli disrupts our mental flow, scattering our attention in various directions.

This scattering effect leaves us with a mind cluttered with disjointed thoughts, making it difficult to maintain a coherent and structured thought process.

The chaos induced by entropy disrupts the harmony of our mental order, leading to a state of cognitive disarray.

Reducing entropy is crucial to providing order to your thoughts, thought process, and overall mental clarity.

By minimizing the chaotic and unpredictable elements that lead to cognitive disarray, you allow your mind to establish a coherent and structured thought process.

This involves learning to manage and filter the vast array of stimuli that compete for your attention on a daily basis.

When you reduce entropy, you effectively lower the volume of distractions and interruptions that can fracture your thoughts.

This process creates a mental environment where thoughts can flow freely and cohesively, leading to greater focus, improved productivity, and an enhanced ability to think clearly and creatively.

Reducing entropy is about taking active control over your thought process and fostering a state of mental order and tranquility.

By ordering your mind, thoughts, and thought process, you can eliminate unnecessary clutter and distractions that often prevent focus.

This kind of mental organization allows you to channel your energy and attention towards what truly matters, thereby enhancing your ability to focus.

It’s like cleaning up a physical workspace: by removing unnecessary items and organizing the necessary ones, you create an environment conducive to focused work.

When your mind is ordered and your thoughts are structured, you can navigate your mental workspace more effectively, leading to deeper and more sustained focus.

By honing your ability to focus, you lay the groundwork for achieving enjoyment and entering a state of flow, or optimal experience.

When you can direct your attention precisely where you want it and maintain that focus, you can fully engage with the task or experience at hand.

This deep immersion allows you to interact with your environment seamlessly, leading to a sense of effortless action and intrinsic reward.

This is the state of flow — a state where you are so absorbed in the activity that you lose track of time and external distractions fade away.

Not only does this result in higher productivity and creativity, but it also brings about a profound sense of enjoyment and fulfillment.

The better your focus, the richer your experiences, leading to a life more filled with enjoyment and flow.

The act of creating order out of entropy is a fulfilling journey in itself.

As you navigate through the chaos and disarray, carving out meaningful patterns and establishing a sense of harmony, there’s a unique sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that comes along.

This process isn’t merely about reaching a state of order, but about the transformative journey you undergo while taming the entropy.

Each step towards reducing chaos and establishing order brings about a sense of progress and mastery, which fuels enjoyment and fulfillment.

It’s a continual dance with entropy, where each movement towards order becomes a source of deep intrinsic joy and satisfaction.

Refining the process of creating order out of entropy is a deeply satisfying and rewarding journey.

As you continually navigate through the chaos and strive for order, each step brings a sense of accomplishment, fostering a sense of enjoyment.

This enjoyment doesn’t necessarily come from the end result, but from the process itself — the challenge, the concentration, the immersion.

This is where the concept of flow comes into play.

When you are fully engaged in the act of taming entropy, you enter a state of flow, a state of optimal experience characterized by focused attention, clear mind, and intrinsic reward.

It is not just about achieving order, but about enjoying the process of getting there. This process, this journey of refinement, is where true enjoyment and flow reside.

This involves exploring the mind, recognizing and comprehending the entropic inputs that influence our experiences, and establishing systems to organize these inputs.

The aim is not just to construct an efficient system, but to derive enjoyment from the process of building and refining this system itself.

The concept here is autotelic, or intrinsically rewarding, where the act of crafting and refining our mental structures and processes becomes a source of enjoyment on its own.

This journey towards self-discovery and self-improvement leads to a state of flow, which is an optimal experience characterized by focused attention, clear mind, and intrinsic reward.

Your thoughts are not your own. Attention is stolen from you, manipulated by others, treated as a commodity, traded in the media, scattered by your phone, and at the same time, completely under your control.

You cannot control external influence. You can control how you process this influence.

A system has inputs and outputs; entropy, and state. You are a system. You are the machine that processes and organizes the inputs of entropy. At any given time, your state, or being of now, is the output of that system.

This system can be sad, happy; angry, forgiving; anxious, calm. By organizing the inputs, you can direct focus, thus driving more enjoyment.

A few tips for reflecting and making order in your thoughts:

1. Take 10 minutes every day, with no distractions. No phone, no TV, no computer, somewhere that you can think clearly. Try sitting in your car on the top of your parking garage, or make a special trip to the local library. Just go sit, or walk where you can be with your thoughts. Set a timer so you don’t have to keep track of time. Keeping track of time will be a distraction during this practice.

2. Let your mind wander… when a thought comes into your mind, ask yourself where did it come from? How does it make you feel? Does it really matter? Move on to the next thought.

3. Create a list in your head, or even write it down. What do you need to do today? How about tomorrow? What did you do yesterday? Are there any issues that need addressing?

4. Practice filtering out the things that don’t really matter. With practice, this will become automatic.

This time will fly by, consider increasing (or decreasing) the time you spend on this practice as you enjoy it more.

This self-reflecting time will provide order to your thoughts. It will allow you bit-by-bit, to put your thoughts in order. What once was a jumbled mess of scattered thoughts start to become organized. Some people call this meditation. You can call it what you want.

Over time, you will start to tweak this practice. You will find nuance, and optimizations. You may even compare the system you developed and the streamlines you have made to other peoples’.

You will start to notice the enjoyment of building this system that exists in your mind.

You will start to become comfortable alone with your thoughts and your thoughts will become a place that you enjoy instead of constantly drowning them out with modern distractions.

By exploring your mind, exploring your thoughts, inputs, the entropy you encounter, you can build your system. It isn’t the goal of getting a “good” system that creates the enjoyment, it is the enjoyment of creating the system. It is autotelic, or intrinsically rewarding. The process is enjoyable for it’s own sake. Autotelic comes from Greek words, “auto”, meaning self, and “telos” meaning goal.

Take Care.

Writer note:

As I sit here writing this in the Public library on my lunch break, I notice that it is quiet, well lit, and cold outside. The cars, people, ducks, swans, and goose are about outside. That is entropy. This happens to be a relaxing moment and my words flow easily.

Because I am in a novel, interesting, and unpredictable environment, my brain has dropped into my state of flow. I can feel it now, time passing is not distracting.

This focus I have achieved was intentional and deliberate. I setup a new environment to me and was able to focus. Focus leads to to enjoyment. Enjoyment is the output of constructing a entropy-lowering system.

The order created for me today is the order of where I sat (by the window), how I am sitting (with good posture), and the environment. I do not control the environment; however I do control what environment that I am in and how I react to it.

Refining this process of creating pre-defined systems to handle the input leads me to more focus, and more enjoyment. This enjoyment for me is flow, and is the optimal experience that we all crave.