The laws of thermodynamics say happiness is a choice

There's an old joke about the laws of thermodynamics, a set of laws to explain how our physical world behaves. It goes something like this:

Zeroth: You must play the game.
First: You can't win.
Second: You can't break even.
Third: You can't quit the game.

This sums up the human perception of reality fairly well. You're born. You must play the game. You try to make life better by winning. There is no such thing as winning for someone else has to lose if you win. You try to break even, but no matter how hard you work, what you get is never entirely the same amount of energy expended. You can't quit the game, either. When you die, all your marbles are returned to the game.

That joke is the most concise expression I've ever seen about the laws of thermodynamics. But there is something else that thermodynamics does: it reminds us that, scientifically and objectively, no matter how much work we put into something, we will never get 100% back. It doesn't matter if we're talking about nuclear energy, doing homework or running a Fortune 500 company. Our tiny little brains seem tuned to trying to achieve break even or better, but it never happens.

The worst part is, no matter what we do, entropy ensures that nothing we do is permanent. Everything degrades, wears out, or changes in some way, even if we don't use that thing. No matter how hard we try to preserve the results of our work, the universe will not let it be. We set something down one day and a few days later it's gone, moved by the spouse, the wind or the flood. It all eventually slips from our grasp.

To put it differently, no amount of money or material wealth can even remotely approximate the effort expended by the brain. The brain is simply never satisfied with the reward received from work. We work, measure our work and yet, we come up short. Even if we have other people working for us, we still think "they" could do better so we push harder, have more meetings, send out more emails and try all manner of encouragement.

When we get home, we have the big screen TV to sink into. We have the sound system for our choice in music. The kitchen to cook in and lose ourselves in a recipe. We can putter around in the basement organizing or building something in the shop. We can check our phone to see what new post appeared on Facebook or Google+ or Redddit or Tumblr. If we're doing well financially, we can check the bank account, the investments, or watch CNBC.

But none of that stuff really matters, at least for me, unless I'm sharing this life with someone else. Having a nice house is better with someone else. I reach break even and more when I share my house with someone else. My wife, my kids, and any relatives or friends who would like to visit. When I'm with other people, all that electronic stuff falls to the wayside. Why?

I think that there are two exceptions to the laws of thermodynamics. The Beatles observed the first exception, "And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make". The second exception? The choice to be happy. Once we make a choice to be happy, all other conditions are moot. Once we're happy with what we have, right now, without reservation, equivalence from the work we perform doesn't matter anymore.

A matter of discipline

For centuries, humans have longed for, and exerted control over their environments. We found trees to get cover from rain. We found caves as nice safe places to rest. We found clothes to cover our hairless bodies. We collected food and hunted, then we thought farming would be a great idea. We built homes, air conditioning and space stations. We have cars, planes and trains. We built computers to assist our putative brains. We made restrooms so that we can do our business safely sheltered from predators.

All of this takes some discipline. It takes time and practice and refinement to make the things we use every day. It starts in a school where we learn to read and write. Then we go to college to learn higher order thinking. Then we get a job and put all that training to work. Day in and day out, we're learning, practicing and building.

While it is true that humans have discipline, results vary considerably from human to human. Some are lazy. Some are go-getters. Some are artists driven by an insatiable urge. Some are politicians, lawyers or con-men.

Whatever characteristics we have as humans, we get them from atoms. True enough, we are essentially an organized collection of atoms. Yet, we are constantly shedding atoms and assimilating new atoms. Somehow, our consciousness has managed to get this collection of atoms to cooperate for very long periods of time. When that cooperation ends, we die.

There is an ongoing, simmering debate over the source of free will and whether free will even exists at all. A few years ago, a small group of mathematicians even went so far as to suggest that if free will is proven in humans, then free will must exist in the particles that make up humans, too. We have to get it from somewhere if we have it.

I get up early every weekday and go to work. I write, I exercise, I bag my lunch. I show up predictably to work and am paid for that service. I take care of myself, my family and my possessions. When I settle down for the day, I put my phone, my keys and my wallet in the same place, every day. Without fail. These are all forms of discipline.

But consider for the moment the possibility that matter has free will. Homes and roads last 30 years. Ancient ruins are fairly intact for eons. Insects have been perfectly preserved in amber for tens of millions of years (I think of this whenever I hear the song, "Stuck In A Moment" by U2). Rocks have been found with compositions and structures hundreds of millions of years old. The sun, is more than 4 billion years old, and it generates light that is 100,000 years old before it escapes the surface.

Matter has discipline that humans can only dream of. Atoms seem to last forever. Uranium, one of the biggest naturally occurring atoms, has a 4.5 billion year half life. Consider the humble proton, a constituent of every atomic nucleus. It has a half life of 10^35 years (that's 10 followed by 35 zeroes). Matter is an amazing example of disciple, in walls, steel, the earth and the sun, and notably, us.

Whatever discipline we have, we got it from the buzzing cloud of atoms that we are comprised of and all around us. Matter has been shown to be 99% empty space. If the proton in a hydrogen atom were the size of a basketball, the electron would be orbiting some 20 miles away. Yet, despite all that space, lead appears quite solid. Drywall appears quite opaque. I sometimes wonder at the discipline required for atoms to stay organized in the walls of my home. I find it interesting that scientists don't think about the locations of these tiny particles of which we are all made - they think about the probabilities of where an electron or proton can be found.

Matter, as the smallest of scales, is about uncertainty and probabilities. Yet, if you want to see discipline, look around. It's everywhere you want to be.