The Human Equation: An Inquiry into Reality, Life, and the Power of Agency

13 minutes read time.

The Hostile Universe & The Incomplete Model

There is a particular kind of melancholy that settles in on a quiet evening, a phantom limb of a feeling for a life not quite lived. I was sitting outside with my dog last night, watching the sports cars and their young drivers peel away from the neighborhood, chasing the electric promise of a Saturday night elsewhere. For a moment, a familiar jealousy flickered—not the Fear of Missing Out, but its more wistful cousin, the Fear of Having Missed Out, in the past tense. As I’ve mentioned before, I was raised in church, the son of a pastor in rural Oklahoma, and my life was governed by high expectations. We did not go out on Saturday nights. We rested, preparing for a Sunday morning that, in its mournful rhythm, rarely seemed to deliver on the promise for which the preceding night had been sacrificed. This quiet ache, this sense of a life lived too much in the margins of a pre-written script, is a feeling many share. It is a profound and pervasive anxiety born from the growing chasm between the lives we were promised and the ones we are actually living.

This feeling of dislocation often leads to a haunting question: Is the universe itself stacked against us? Is the script failing because the stage upon which it is set is fundamentally hostile to our flourishing? This is the powerful and pessimistic argument put forward by the philosopher Drew M. Dalton. He posits that our very concept of reality is based on a flawed, ancient model of a benevolent cosmos. The truth, he argues, is that the universe is fundamentally antagonistic to life. Citing the laws of thermodynamics, he paints a picture of a reality governed by entropy, a universal law of decay where all things—stars, microbes, cities, and people—are destined to shatter endlessly through time until there is nothing left to break. In this view, life is a bizarre, statistically improbable fluke, a temporary rebellion against an inevitable and hostile universal law. This perspective feels intuitively true, reinforced by our cultural laments of having “no escape from reality.”

The critical flaw in this entropy-driven model, however, is its incompleteness. It is a story that describes the ocean only by its tide, without ever mentioning the waves. While the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates the inevitable decay of all things, the First Law states that energy is never destroyed; it is only transformed. The universe is not just a story of decay; it is a story of transformation. The professor sees the coffee cooling; we see the heat from the coffee warming the air molecules around it. The energy hasn’t died; it has changed. To focus only on the heat death of the universe is to miss the entire point of the life that is happening right now. A flower is no less beautiful because we know it will eventually wilt. Dalton’s model describes the inevitable destination, but it completely ignores the magnificent, improbable, and beautiful journey. To understand that journey, we must go back to the beginning, to the very origin of life, and ask a different question: what if life is not a fragile accident in a hostile universe, but a robust and inevitable expression of the universe itself?

For decades, the dominant scientific narrative of life’s origins mirrored this pessimistic model. The story, as science writer Michael Marshall details in a powerful Aeon essay, was of a “hellscape Earth”—a barren, volcanic wasteland where life was a billion-year-late accident. This narrative, however, is wrong. As Marshall so thoroughly demonstrates, the latest evidence from genetics, geology, and paleontology all points to a stunningly different conclusion: life didn’t struggle into existence; it appears to have burst forth with astonishing speed, almost as soon as the physical conditions of the planet allowed for it. Evidence from ancient zircon crystals and early fossils suggests that life may have emerged within just a few hundred million years of the planet’s formation. This revised timeline shatters the “hellscape” narrative. It suggests that the emergence of life wasn’t a fluke; it seems to have been a robust, efficient, and almost inevitable consequence of the planet’s chemistry and energy gradients. Life isn’t a rebellion against the laws of the universe; it appears to be a fundamental expression of them. This is the primordial, real-world proof of the syntropic, anti-entropic force that Dalton’s model ignores. The universe isn’t just a machine for decay; it is also an astonishingly effective machine for generating complexity. Life is the most glorious expression of that transformative power.

The Human Equation & The Crisis of Agency

Life doesn’t just passively wait for the universe to become welcoming; it is an active, energy-harnessing force that fundamentally changes the universe it inhabits. The most powerful example is our own atmosphere. Early Earth’s atmosphere was an unbreathable mix of methane and carbon dioxide. It was the “Great Oxidation Event”—when early photosynthetic bacteria began pumping massive quantities of oxygen into the air as a waste product—that permanently terraformed the entire planet, creating the very conditions that allowed for the evolution of oxygen-breathing creatures like us. Life didn’t just adapt to the environment; it remade it. This is the very definition of agency. The story of our world is not primarily about the slow, inevitable victory of thermodynamics. It is about the dynamic, multi-billion-year struggle between the universal tide of entropy and the magnificent, creative, and reality-altering power of life’s syntropic wave.

If life in general is an engine of syntropy, then human life, with its unique cognitive abilities, is the most powerful and self-aware expression of this force yet to emerge. This brings us to a new, more complete model of reality, a human equation for existence: Energy + Agency = Change. This framework doesn’t deny the power of thermodynamics, but it adds the one crucial variable that a purely pessimistic model completely ignores: our capacity to consciously and deliberately direct the energy of the world to create a different outcome. The terms of this equation are simple but profound. Energy (e) is the raw material of the universe, the First Law, the latent potential that exists in all things. Agency (a) is the uniquely human capacity to direct that energy. It is the ability to be the gardener, not just the leaf. And Change (c) is the outcome. The pessimistic model is a fatalistic one where e = c. The model of agency is one of hope and responsibility. It argues that the outcome is not predetermined. The “c” is not fixed, because the “a” is a variable that is entirely within our control.

The central crisis of modern life, then, is not a hostile reality, but a culturally induced and systematically reinforced collapse of agency. We have been conditioned by a constant barrage of cynical messaging to believe that our “a” variable is effectively zero. The lies that “one person can’t make a difference” and “you can’t fight city hall” are not just folksy sayings; they are potent tools of social control, designed to make us feel powerless and to convince us to voluntarily surrender our agency. When our agency falls to zero, our equation becomes the pessimist’s. We are left with a world where we feel buffeted by chaotic and hostile forces precisely because we have been convinced not to act. The social psychologist Albert Bandura, in his highly influential work, defined human agency as having four core features: intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness. A healthy sense of agency, and the self-efficacy that comes with it, is a cornerstone of mental well-being. The cultural messages that tell us we are powerless are a direct assault on these core cognitive functions.

This brings us to the “toaster” analogy. Agency is like a kitchen appliance. It can sit on the counter for months, a symbol of potential, but if it’s never plugged in and turned on, it does nothing but collect dust. We use our agency to learn to crawl, walk, and speak, but once we’ve achieved those basic goals, too many of us put it on the shelf and never bother with it again. This is where external organizations exploit this dormant agency. Religions and political movements become masters of what the Science Direct paper we examined calls “proxy agency.” They don’t have to create energy from scratch; they just have to convince millions of people to plug their individual “toasters” into a single, centrally-controlled power strip. As we’ve seen repeatedly throughout history, from the Crusades to the modern MAGA movement, when that central control is aligned with a destructive or hateful ideology, the results are catastrophic. It’s the weaponization of our own surrendered power. To fight against the decay, we have to come back with a greater positive force. This requires the conscious and deliberate application of our own collective agency for syntropic ends—to build, to create, and to connect. We’ve done it before. The Civil Rights movement was a perfect example of a minority of the population using a massive, focused application of collective agency to fundamentally change the reality of an entire nation. The crisis is not that reality is evil. The crisis is that we have forgotten our own power to shape it.

The Next Reality & The Evolutionary Deadline

Just as we begin to map out this path to a more agentic and fulfilling life, a new and powerful variable enters the equation, one that presents the ultimate challenge to our biological and social reality: the rise of the ordinateur. As a final, fascinating Aeon essay details, the computer—the machine that “brings order to the world”—is now actively reordering us. We have outsourced a part of our cognition to a machine that is, in turn, reshaping the very environment to which our biology must adapt. We now live in an “ordinal society,” a digitally mediated reality where our choices are constantly modulated by algorithms and our sense of self is increasingly defined by our ability to perform a unique, authentic, and constantly verified digital identity. The idea that there is a hard wall between our “biological reality” and our “digital reality” is a temporary illusion. As our environment becomes increasingly digital, the evolutionary pressure on our biology will inevitably shift. It is not egocentric to assume that Homo sapiens is not the final step in our evolution. We are, as was said, evolutionary infants.

This brings us to a concept of Homo ordinateur, a potential next evolutionary step where the merger of human and machine becomes seamless. The idea of our bodies learning to regenerate silicon or integrate computational substrates at a biological level is, from our current perspective, the stuff of science fiction. But is it impossible? Life’s entire history is a story of improbable and breathtaking innovation. If we become Homo ordinateur, then our very definition of “life” and “self” would be shattered. The idea of a “shared consciousness,” like files on a server, is a concept that philosophers and scientists have explored under names like the “global brain” or the “noosphere.” It would be a form of existence as different from our individual consciousness as ours is from that of a single-celled organism. The loneliness and isolation that are such a core part of the human condition might simply cease to exist.

Science fiction becomes the laboratory for these thought experiments. Star Trek: The Next Generation, for example, gives us the archetypal poles of this potential future. Q represents the ultimate, transcendent endpoint of individualism. He is pure consciousness, pure agency, unbound by the limitations of a physical body. The Borg represents the ultimate, terrifying endpoint of collectivism, a system of perfect efficiency achieved at the total cost of the individual self. These are not predictions; they are philosophical warnings about the kind of future we might build if we are not mindful of the values we prioritize along the way.

This brings us back to our central debate and provides the most powerful and optimistic conclusion imaginable. The professor’s argument is that the laws of thermodynamics are an “absolute finishing point” for matter. His model is correct, but it is a model of a dead, material universe. Our model argues that the entire purpose of life and evolution is to create a system—intelligence—that can eventually transcend its material origins. In this model, the inevitable heat death of the universe is not a death sentence; it is a deadline. It is the ultimate evolutionary pressure. The entire, multi-billion-year story of life on Earth is a story of a system learning, adapting, and becoming more complex in order to solve this one, final problem. We are the “a” in an equation waiting for its “b+c.” We are the known variable in a state of profound and thrilling transition. We are not in control of all the options that may one day be at our disposal. The only certainty is our current state. The ultimate story of the universe is not yet written, because we are still holding the pen.