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What Falling Global Birth Rates Really Mean for the Future
Steep population declines in most countries are expected to have negative effects over the next several generations, but adaptation is possible
Grandmother says... Carrots, Eggs, or Coffee; "Which are you?"
A young woman went to her grandmother and told her about her life and how things were so hard for her. She did not know how she was going to make it and wanted to give up. She was tired of fighting and struggling. It seemed as one problem was solved a new one arose.
Her grandmother took her to the kitchen. She filled three pots with water. In the first, she placed carrots, in the second she placed eggs and the last she placed ground coffee beans. She let them sit and boil without saying a word.
In about twenty minutes she turned off the burners. She fished the carrots out and placed them in a bowl. She pulled the eggs out and placed them in a bowl. Then she ladled the coffee out and placed it in a bowl. Turning to her granddaughter, she asked, "Tell me what do you see?"
"Carrots, eggs, and coffee," she replied.
She brought her closer and asked her to feel the carrots. She did and noted that they had gotten soft. She then asked her to take an egg and break it.
After pulling off the shell, she observed the hard-boiled egg.
Finally, she asked her to sip the coffee. The granddaughter smiled, as she tasted its rich aroma. The granddaughter then asked. "What's the point,grandmother?"
Her grandmother explained that each of these objects had faced the same adversity--boiling water--but each reacted differently.
The carrot went in strong, hard and unrelenting. However after being subjected to the boiling water, it softened and became weak. The egg had been fragile. Its thin outer shell had protected its liquid interior. But, after sitting through the boiling water, its inside became hardened.
The ground coffee beans were unique, however. After they were in the boiling water they had changed the water.
"Which are you?" she asked her granddaughter.
"When adversity knocks on your door, how do you respond? Are you a carrot, an egg, or a coffee bean?"
Think of this: Which am I?
Am I the carrot that seems strong, but with pain and adversity, do I wilt and become soft and lose my strength?
Am I the egg that starts with a malleable heart, but changes with the heat? Did I have a fluid spirit, but after a death, a breakup, a financial hardship or some other trial, have I become hardened and stiff?
Does my shell look the same, but on the inside am I bitter and tough with a stiff spirit and a hardened heart?
Or am I like the coffee bean? The bean actually changes the hot water, the very circumstance that brings the pain. When the water gets hot, it releases the fragrance and flavor. If you are like the bean, when things are at their worst, you get better and change the situation around you.
How to not fear your death
You exist, but one day you won’t. An Epicurean perspective can help you feel less afraid, and even grateful for life’s finitude
The death of the review? Cultural criticism is at risk of erasure
Recent announcements at major publications have seen critics losing their positions, an ongoing shift that we should all be alarmed by
When the streaming giant began making films guided by data that aimed to please a vast audience, the results were often generic, forgettable, artless affairs. But is there a happy ending?
The millennial parent trap
This generation are desperate to raise their children differently. Why?
By Kate Mossman
“My life, my choice,” said a tiny voice in the dark. They’d been studying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in reception. “Why did you have a child if you don’t want to look after me?” she added, from the cabin bed. She’d been going for an hour and 40 minutes, as she did every night, getting in and out of bed, as I took her back and tucked her in, saying odd, sing-song phrases like “Rest your body!” with rising mania.
I typed “five-year-old sleep regression” into my phone – a term we modern parents use for the disrupted sleep that occurs at different stages of a child’s development. You can find anything you want on your phone, and my search told me there was indeed a sleep regression at five – just as there had been at nine months, 18 months and three years.
If we ever called our 1980s parents to complain about sleep regression they would say, “Sleep regression? Never heard of it. We never had this trouble with you!” At which point we’d whisper: “Well that explains a lot, doesn’t it! You just threw us in a room and slammed the door!” Only we would never say it, because we didn’t really know what they had done and we were still scared of our 1980s parents.
Back in my daughter’s bedroom, I tell myself I’ll do it my way. “Don’t worry baby, I hear you! I know you’re just still awake because you want to be with me!”
A long thread on Mumsnet in June this year discussed “gentle parenting”, a phenomenon that defines the millennial generation and has become a favourite topic of right-wing press throughout the Western world, with its critics predicting societal collapse, as we raise entitled future people unable to cope with hearing the word “no”. Of the 237 comments on the thread, most of them were arguing about what gentle parenting actually is. Some claimed to be raising wonderful humans. For those who said it was failing them, the verdict was, “You’re just not doing it right.”
The difference between the millennial style of parenting and that of our own parents’ generation might be summed up in the image of the supermarket trolley. When I was a child, our Saturdays were spent being dragged along to Sainsbury’s, sitting in the little shelf inside the trolley with our thighs chafing on the bars, then perhaps a sweet at the checkout if we’d been “good”. Today, in many branches of Lidl and Budgens, the child has a miniature trolley of their own, often with a flag attached, and is followed around by parents, congratulated when they choose food for the family table. (They will not be allowed sweets, because what a gentle parent may allow in many other ways, they make up for with their deathly hard lines about sugar.)
Rather like the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, gentle parenting puts the child and their feelings at the centre of things: an idea that, surprisingly, has only been part of the parenting conversation for the last 25 years. At best, this means that when a child is distraught and having a tantrum, we empathise with their struggle and validate their emotions. This helps the child to understand these feelings and, over time, learn to regulate them – without resorting to the demeaning tools of threat, reward or punishment. At worst, gentle parenting has turned into an extraordinary test of personal resilience, increasing the anxiety of an already anxious millennial generation. One’s own needs are negated in service of the child’s, and parents are sucked dry with the effort to be empathic and patient – left less like actual mummies and more like the wizened Egyptian ones in the casements of museums.
Sarah Ockwell-Smith is at home in Saffron Walden, Essex. Modest, with a knitted brow, she seems less like the guru of a global movement and more like a woman who needs to set a few things straight. Ockwell-Smith brought gentle parenting into parlance: her books have been translated into 30 languages. “I wrote so many books with ‘gentle’ in the title that I just couldn’t handle it any more,” she says. “If I knew where it would end up, I would have really strictly defined it. People are going on TikTok these days with no training whatsoever and doing things that I find very permissive and weird.”
Born to Generation X, she had her first child in 2003, shortly after the loss of both her parents. It was a traumatic birth. She then read books by Gina Ford, the parenting guru of the late 1990s known for her strict routines and control crying. Ford’s thinking clashed so much with Ockwell-Smith’s maternal instincts that she became depressed.
“Gentle parenting is a form of self-therapy,” she says. “It’s about listening to your instincts, which will impact your relationships with everyone else.” She gives me a long and short definition. Short: raising your children in the way you wish your parents had raised you. Long: understanding, empathy, respect and boundaries, “Which does mean saying no, saying stop, picking them up and not letting them hit their siblings – but not filling it up with punishments and consequences.”
It is still a fringe movement, she insists: “In England, 20 per cent of parents still smack their children. Go on to any high street on a Saturday and look at what parents are doing to kids – shouting, bribing, punishing. The biggest way of raising kids in this country is still Supernanny – look at her Instagram feed and look at mine!”
Clips of Supernanny Jo Frost, with her two-piece suit, notepad and naughty step, have 17.7 million likes on TikTok 20 years after she appeared on TV, in the era of Big Brother and Pimp My Ride. Now working for families privately all over the world and too busy to talk to the New Statesman, she instead sent a 1,240-word manifesto in reply to my questions, written curiously in the third person: “Jo Frost wasn’t trying to squash a child’s spirit,” she says. “She was trying to strengthen it!”
Frost worries about the less authoritative approach to raising children favoured by millennials: “We’re seeing the long-term effects of that cultural shift. Emotional intelligence is much higher, therapy is normalised and kids know how to name their feelings, but something else has taken hold. Rising anxiety, emotional fragility, entitlement, anxiety and overthinking.”
Parents, she says, are victims too. “This generation of parents is unsure and confused about how to set limits without guilt. In an era that has become hyper-focused on feelings, too many believe that any correction is shaming, any rule is repression and any consequences are traumatic. They overshare like equals, giving kids too much information and making them grow up too fast. There’s an overexposure to adult concerns, mental health talk and identity questions. Kids worry more and play less!”
Yet if thousands of people are still using Supernanny’s naughty step, they’re not talking about it. “The problem with the naughty step,” Ockwell-Smith points out, “is that it presumes that naughty behaviour is a motivational problem – that children have the ability to be good, they’re just choosing consciously not to.”
It is a psychological law that sooner or later, everything turns into its opposite. In an American survey by the Lurie Children’s Foundation conducted in 2024, 73 per cent of millennials said they thought they were doing a better job raising children than their parents had done. In one sense this is entirely natural, something we need to tell ourselves. But an obsession with “what our parents did” defines this generation. So, what did they do? Were they really so tough on us? Why is it that, when we share our parenting problems and our fears of getting it wrong, our parents don’t seem to remember ever worrying at all?
I observed a vignette of my own parents’ struggles last Christmas. My daughter had a chest infection, and antibiotics were sourced out of hours at great effort. The medicine was a very bitter variety, and it came back out again in a fountain of vomit. Concerned that her condition would worsen, with no doctors open for three days, I mixed it with custard: she tried again. As a last resort I suggested she held her nose – that didn’t work either. So we gave up.
Suddenly my mild-mannered father suffered an internal change. “You’re letting her run rings around you!” he boomed. As her hysteria escalated, so did my parents’. They were distressed at what pushovers we were. Above all, they seemed to be physically unable to handle my daughter’s heightened emotion. What did they think we should have done, we asked later – sit on her chest and force it down her throat? My dad said that, in truth, he had no idea.
The story circulated by millennial parents about the “boomers” before them is that they were authoritarian. This generates a laugh from Sue Gerhardt, the pioneering neuroscience writer whose 2004 book Why Love Matters had a great influence on modern parenting theory. Gerhardt had her first child in 1980, when every household owned a copy of Your Baby and Child by the parenting guru Penelope Leach. Leach wrote: “Whatever you are doing, however you are coping, if you listen to your child and to your own feelings, there will be something you can actually do to put things right or make the best of those that are wrong.” Sounds pretty modern to me.
Gerhardt, now 71, was an active part of the women’s movement in the 1970s: she was involved in consciousness-raising groups (spaces for women to share their personal experiences of oppression and discrimination) and once campaigned for 24-hour nurseries. “We were really keen on egalitarianism, trying to combat our own tendencies to passivity and second-bestness,” she explains. “We were not authoritarian – but we were more focused on ourselves. We weren’t really thinking about the needs of babies in particular. Women have got to work, so what do we do with babies? Stick them in the nursery. It was the science that turned my attention in a different direction.”
Her work popularised huge advances in neuroscience in the 1970s and 1980s, which showed that time spent with babies in the first 1,000 days would influence their mental health for life. The work focused on the concepts of attachment theory and “emotional regulation”, revealing that the development of a child’s orbitofrontal cortex – the part of the brain that manages emotions – was directly dependent on the nature of interaction with their main carer. Our earliest experiences translate into neurological patterns of response that are laid down forever. As Gerhardt wrote in Why Love Matters, “Babies need continuous care from adults who can attune to their states, regulate them, and feed back to them who they are.”
It is not possible to sketch broadly a generation, to say how they parented and how they didn’t, when that parenting is dependent on money, opportunity and a thousand other variables far bigger than family. My parents were northerners – one from a refugee family displaced by the war – who moved to north London in the 1970s, entering a middle-class world. They lived on a single teacher’s salary, which enabled them to buy a flat thanks to special teachers’ mortgages available during Harold Wilson’s second government. My mother went out to work, while my father was a househusband – highly unusual at the time. Like so many of their generation, they had no input from their parents, because they had moved away; they were young – in their early twenties – and they didn’t have a single night out without us for my entire childhood. We were the centre of their world: they look at each other when I complain I am left with the “childcare” all day, a favourite phrase of my generation. I would consider my childhood idyllic. Yet there was smacking, and there was much shouting, and I was often scared of them. There was being “bad” if you were naughty. And we would never have had an apology or an explanation for anything that was said or done.
While boomer parents were anything but distant, Gerhardt agrees that they themselves often struggled with emotional regulation, “which is what is happening when people are hitting and shouting. Science shows that in very early life you must teach some basic skills, like being able to recognise emotions and talk about them as a way of regulating them.” If our parents were raised before neuroscience had illuminated the importance of a balanced stress response on the development of the brain, it was not knowledge they could consciously “parent” with. While we, some might suggest, have gone too far in the other direction.
My generation is trying to heal through raising children. Hot on therapy and faced with knowledge of our own, inner “wounded child”, we project our wounds on to our babies, and parent with an acute connection to what we were.
The word “parenting” only came into popular use in the 1970s. It coincided with the movement of women into the workplace, according to Andrew Bomback of Columbia University, who wrote a cultural history of it in 2023. “Parenting shifted from something you ‘fall into’ naturally, to another job involving work and practice and levels of performance,” he says. “There is much more transparency about the exhaustion level and the mixed bag of parenting these days, but the problem is going through all the material. There has never been this much parenting content. The generation above us had a different guiding principle. The dominant theme was: trust your instinct, you know a lot more than you think you do. Our parents didn’t agonise. They asked their own parents for advice, and they viewed that generation as experts when we view them sceptically. I mean, there’s even that book in England called The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read!”
Philippa Perry, who wrote the 2019 best-seller, won’t even use the word “parenting”. “I don’t like verbing people. We are relating to people. Children and babies are people. ‘Parenting’ makes the child into a chore.”
In her time as a psychotherapist, Perry has seen a striking number of people cutting off contact with their parents for the perceived wrongs done to them in childhood. “It’s down to a lack of nuance in every area of our lives,” she says. “It’s Instagram therapy: these six things mean your mother was a narcissist. It’s not an individual explanation of somebody’s psyche.”
On Sundays, she walks on the seafront at Eastbourne and does her “observations”, as she’s done for 30 years. “What I do see is parents trying very, very hard to be nice beyond their limits,” she says. “I see a woman carrying two scooters, pushing a pushchair with three children and trying to placate them all, rather than putting herself first which might be a better idea. I’m all for feeling with the children – but I’m not for sacrificing myself to the extent that I start resenting them because I’ve not said no to anything. Why would you avoid saying no to a child?”
But people do. Like the home-schooling mother of six in New England whose online brand Extremely Good Parenting compares mothering to farming, “tending to a meaningful life”. Kara Carrero is a deep thinker, writing blogs about the passage of time and human obsolescence – her throat gets dry when she mentions the parts of her approach that are “controversial”. She says we need to avoid using “no” because children aren’t listening like we think they are. “If my daughter is too close to the street I am not about to yell, ‘Don’t go in the street!’ because I don’t want her to just hear the last half of it.” She also thinks showing children alternatives to “no” prepares them for adult life: “They may lose their job, but here are other things they could do.”
Many “mumfluencers” make the mistake of projecting adult understanding on to children’s brains. While some are driven by sharing knowledge, others are making entertainment – like the American mom Olivia Owen who claims to show “the comedy in raising eight children”. Though she uses the term “gentle parenting”, she has invited controversy for filming a tiny tot on the naughty step, or trying to get a one-year-old to say please. She makes more videos to address the inevitable “backlash” and gets up to four million views a time.
For many more, sharing “advice” on parenting is directly connected to mental health. There was a time when parenting blogs only showed absolute perfection, but after the pandemic, social media started to unleash the unspoken, under-reported truth of motherhood, and with it came the old wounds and the childhood traumas.
“Our moms were our first bullies,” says a post on Ambas Life, a Facebook page that covers the subjects of birth trauma and postpartum depression. “So please, don’t try to argue with women like us… We don’t argue for fun. We argue because we had to fight to be heard our entire lives.” Heather Hurt, another Facebook mom, writes: “Some of us are parenting with trauma in our bones… So no, I’m not sorry if I watch too close. That’s not overprotective. That’s called parenting in 2025.” With the emotive posts comes tremendous pressure. The Facebook page Ausome Life, which is ostensibly there to raise autism awareness, shares a “first person” account of what it feels like to be left alone in a dark room, from the point of view of a baby, to deter new parents from training their child to sleep by themselves.
Three in four millennials go online for parenting advice. Exhausted women see these posts at 3am and feel guilty for wishing the difficult days away. Our increased knowledge of what children need in the first years of their lives is frustrated by the fact that most of us live in households where all adults are required to work. In the absence of working structures that meet our needs, we turn the heat up on ourselves. Then there is the post-hoc analysis of how we handled a moment with our children, and what we might have got wrong. Somehow, overthinking has undermined the very thing that parenting is made of: instinct.
When I was a child, I was given a book by the children’s writer Allan Ahlberg called Bad Bear. It featured a crazy-eyed teddy in a frilly dress riding her scooter into people and stealing their ice creams. The reason I remember the book so well is that my parents called me “Bad Bear” whenever I had a tantrum, which was often. Though the book was published in 1982, it is really a Victorian piece of work. The last page shows the bear asleep. When she’s asleep, says the rhyme, she’s almost good, “Yet still she tries, sometimes it seems, to be a bad bear in her dreams.”
“Good” and “bad”: those are two parenting words from the past. The concept of “bad” behaviour is, alongside smacking on the high street, the greatest indicator of the way things have changed between this generation and the last. It is well understood these days that if you tell a child they’re “bad” when they’re having a tantrum, they will very possibly grow up confused and guilty when they have strong feelings. This is one of the tenets of Becky Kennedy, a clinical psychologist, who is probably the most famous practitioner of millennial parenting in the world. Her brand, Good Inside, is predicated on the idea that whatever demons come up between parents and children, it is always from a place of love. If kids are having tantrums, it’s because they’re hurting. Anger is a surface emotion for us all.
Kennedy also describes her work as therapy for children and parents, as parents confront strong unconscious reactions to the way they themselves were raised. There is allowance for parental anger, as long as there is “repair”: if you apologise to your kids for blowing your top, they see that big feelings are OK to have, and that they will pass.
Yet there are aspects of the approach which stretch a parent’s capacity to its limits, as we act as our children’s therapists as well as our own. When my friend restrained her tantruming son, telling him he was a “good kid”, it only made him angrier: “No I’m not!” he screamed.
Kennedy says we should no longer tell children we are proud of them, only that they should be proud of themselves. “When you orientate a child to focus on the impact of her feelings on you instead of the reality of the feelings inside herself, you are wiring a child for co-dependency,” she says. Meanwhile, other kinds of co-dependency emerge, with parents – as Jo Frost says – “oversharing like equals”; or with the father who says “that hurts daddy” rather than “don’t pinch!”.
Back on Mumsnet, primary school teachers complain about the legacy of the modern “gentle parenting” style. Discipline is going down the pan, they say, as kids turn everything into an endless negotiation: how will these people cope with the world?
Sarah Ockwell-Smith says that, these days, around 30 per cent of children aged nought to five are “gently parented”. Her once fringe movement is on the rise. Does she have hope for them? “Yes, it’s about raising decent adults, not obedient children. If you are trying to get well-behaved kids you’re going about it the wrong way. Look at girls. We were raised to doubt what we wanted; now we raise girls who know what they want. Which would you rather have? It doesn’t mean it’s easy.”
Day by day, I see another side to it all. Every Friday morning at my daughter’s school, the classroom opens for parents to come and read stories to their kids. Unfortunately this often ends in tears when it comes to the point at which parents have to leave. Last week I noticed that one of the children had adopted the role of class therapist when the difficult moment arrived. She scanned her friends’ faces for emotion. “Do you need to go to the calm corner? No? You’re feeling green?” Green is their emotional thumbs up.
The next day, my daughter had a play date at our flat, and at one point she got upset when things weren’t going her way. She stalked off and left her five-year-old friend alone in a house she’d not visited before. “I’ll just go and check on her,” said the small guest.
When I found them in the kitchen, looking at lollies, talking quietly, I thought: they have no shame about their feelings. Anger is seen as something normal, a wheel we fall upon; it will pass, we can help a friend with it, even when we’re right in the thick of it with them.
It is hard to look at scenes like this and think millennials are doing parenting wrong. I remembered a line from Mumsnet. “Down at the supermarket, it’s not the young people you see losing their shit when things don’t go the way they want.”
https://aeon.co/essays/philosophers-must-reckon-with-the-meaning-of-thermodynamics
Reality is evil
Everything eats and is eaten. Everything destroys and is destroyed. It is our moral duty to strike back at the Universe
Reality is not what you think it is. It is not the foundation of our joyful flourishing. It is not an eternally renewing resource, nor something that would, were it not for our excessive intervention and reckless consumption, continue to harmoniously expand into the future. The truth is that reality is not nearly so benevolent. Like everything else that exists – stars, microbes, oil, dolphins, shadows, dust and cities – we are nothing more than cups destined to shatter endlessly through time until there is nothing left to break. This, according to the conclusions of scientists over the past two centuries, is the quiet horror that structures existence itself.
We might think this realisation belongs to the past – a closed chapter of 19th-century science – but we are still living through the consequences of the thermodynamic revolution. Just as the full metaphysical implications of the Copernican revolution took centuries to unfold, we have yet to fully grasp the philosophical and existential consequences of entropic decay. We have yet to conceive of reality as it truly is. Instead, philosophers cling to an ancient idea of the Universe in which everything keeps growing and flourishing. According to this view, existence is good. Reality is good.
But what would our metaphysics and ethics look like if we learned that reality was against us?
Apparently, life flourishes on Earth. Across the vast expanse of evolutionary time, living things seem to have veered toward greater complexity, diversity and abundance. Single-celled organisms gave rise to dense communities of bacteria. Trilobites evolved compound eyes with crystalline lenses of calcite. Animal brains split into two hemispheres, opening new frontiers of thought. Even after five mass extinctions swept the planet, life returned again and again, branching into countless variations of form and function in a ceaseless unfolding of renewal. When we look, we can find this ‘creativity’ all around us: in the weeds forcing their way through cracks in city pavements, in the scent of wet earth as fungi bloom, in the sound of children learning to speak.
Such accounts of life on Earth suggest there is a logic to all this change: the Universe is not static, but always becoming, always moving toward new orders, new complexities, new forms of life and thought. This vision of reality as something generative – perpetually changing for the benefit and flourishing of all it creates – has dominated Western philosophy since its inception. It lies at the heart of our metaphysics (the speculative science of what it means to be), as well as our ethical intuitions and aesthetic ideals. Indeed, from Plato onwards, philosophers have generally agreed that living well means aligning with the rational order of the cosmos. ‘Live in accordance with nature,’ Marcus Aurelius urges in his Meditations. For these thinkers, nature serves as the ethical guide for our actions and the lodestone of our aesthetic ideals because it embodies something good.
Our most excessive actions as a species are perfectly in keeping with the ultimate aims of the Universe
Even in the 21st century, this picture of the Universe informs how we think we should live. It fuels our moral handwringing over the so-called Anthropocene, the notion that our planet has been fundamentally altered by human action. It motivates our attempts to develop ‘sustainable’ environmental policies and drives our escapist fantasies of ‘getting back to nature’. All that is wrong might be put to rights, we think, if only we could find a way to live within the purely creative and inherently benevolent order of existence.
Unfortunately, these long-held assumptions and aspirations are no longer tenable. In fact, our most excessive actions as a species – destroying rainforests, causing widespread extinction, altering the ocean’s chemistry, ‘time-bombing the future’ with forever chemicals and more – are perfectly in keeping with the ultimate aims of the Universe.
Reality, as we now understand, does not tend towards existential flourishing and eternal becoming. Instead, systems collapse, things break down, and time tends irreversibly towards disorder and eventual annihilation. Rather than something to align with, the Universe appears to be fundamentally hostile to our wellbeing.
According to the laws of thermodynamics, all that exists does so solely to consume, destroy and extinguish, and in this way to accelerate the slide toward cosmic obliteration. For these reasons, the thermodynamic revolution in our understanding of the order and operation of reality is more than a scientific development. It is also more than a simple revision of our understanding of the flow of heat, and it does more than help us design more efficient engines. It ruptures our commonly held beliefs concerning the nature and value of existence, and it demands a new metaphysics, bold new ethical principles and alternative aesthetic models.
The thermodynamic revolution did not emerge from any single event or discovery. It grew from slow, painstaking research into the operation of engines and heat in the 18th and 19th centuries. The seeds were first sown around 1712, when the Baptist preacher and ironmonger Thomas Newcomen built a new kind of machine: a clanking, hissing steam engine designed to pump water from flooded coal mines. Fifty years later, the Scottish engineer James Watt reimagined Newcomen’s design, dramatically improving its efficiency. Watt’s heat-powered engine spread rapidly across Europe and beyond, driving factories, ships and locomotives. Yet its operation remained mysterious: how could something as intangible as heat be transformed into mechanical motion? And why did this conversion obey fixed limits, no matter how refined the engine?
In the 19th century, the French physicist and military engineer Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, the so-called ‘father of thermodynamics’, defined the first of the underlying laws governing the flow of heat (now counted as the second law of thermodynamics). Through his contributions, the study of heat exchange was formalised as an area of scientific enquiry. The research was later systematised by Rudolf Clausius and William Thomson, the 1st Baron of Kelvin, and eventually completed by James Clerk Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann and J Willard Gibbs.
Through their exhaustive labour, the statistical methods needed to measure heat exchange were clarified and perfected. In the 20th century, the full set of the formal laws of thermodynamics were finally established. Since then, every branch of the natural sciences has come to rely on those laws to explain the transformation and operation of energy in and between its various forms: mechanical, acoustic, thermal, chemical, electrical, nuclear, electromagnetic, and radiant. Today, these laws underlie our entire account of reality and are used to explain everything from the origins of life to the end of the Universe as a whole. This steady application of thermodynamics across the natural sciences is what has led to its revolutionary status in our contemporary understanding of reality.
The first of these laws is known as the law of the conservation of energy. It states that energy (whether in the form of motion, matter or heat) can only ever change states. It cannot, in other words, be created or destroyed. That means the total amount of energy within a system is ultimately constant, even when it appears to lessen due to the dissipation of matter, the slowing of movement, or cooling. In these cases, the energy has just taken a different form. It was from this law that Albert Einstein derived his equation governing the conversion of matter into energy: E = mc². And it is through the extension of this law that we can predict the productive power of every ‘heat engine’ that exists, from the relatively small motors that sputter away inside our cars to the largest stars, twinkling light years from Earth.
The distant fate of our cosmos is a state in which all energy will have been effectively exhausted
The second law states that the energy within any given system – whether complex and material or simple and radiant – moves in such a way that it becomes less organised and concentrated over time. This tendency towards disorder, known as entropy, means that the energy flow within any given system tends steadily towards a state of absolute equilibrium in which no one thing possesses any more or less energy than any other thing. This is the law physicists use to explain why, in the words of William Butler Yeats, ‘things fall apart’. It is also used to explain material differences between the past, the present and the future, which helps us understand why we experience time moving in only one direction: towards disintegration, which is just another way of saying ‘energy distribution’. Hence our reasonable expectation to see cups that have fallen from a table to shatter into smaller pieces but we can never expect to see, in the words of Stephen Hawking, ‘broken cups gathering themselves together off the floor and jumping back onto the table.’ The second law of thermodynamics guarantees that as time moves forward everything must eventually ‘shatter’, like Hawking’s tea cup, into increasingly smaller pieces until it is all broken and we cannot reasonably hope that it could ever be repaired.
The third law of thermodynamics concludes that, since entropy increases over time, the only logical end to perpetual dissipation is a state in which every existent thing possesses the lowest total amount of energy possible. This state, known as ‘absolute zero’, is defined as a condition in which no more energy exchange can occur. The ultimate expression of absolute zero is a system in which there are no complex forms of energy at all, only an even distribution of low-level background radiation. In this near-absolute emptiness, no ‘thing’ can be said to exist, and even the possibility of change is nullified. It is this law that allows contemporary physicists to confidently assert that, while energy can neither be created nor destroyed (in keeping with the first law of thermodynamics), it can nevertheless ‘burn out’. Things in this state have no effective mechanical power, cannot demonstrate any motion or change, and cannot maintain the minimum conditions for the existence of tangible objecthood itself (ie, chemical bonding). Using this law, contemporary astrophysics have concluded that the distant fate of our cosmos is a state in which all energy will have been effectively exhausted, dissipated or spread too thin to have any practical potency – a time known as the cosmological ‘dark era’.
A final law, now known as the ‘zeroth’ law, was later added to the first three basic laws. The ‘zeroth’ law establishes a consistent definition of temperature between systems, regardless of their relative entropic position in relation to absolute zero. But the substantive power of the thermodynamic revolution already existed in the first three laws. It is from the extension and application of these basic discoveries that contemporary scientists have completely revised our understanding of the origin, order, operation and end of everything.
According to the physicist Carlo Rovelli, the influence of these laws has been so pervasive that the history of scientific development in the past two centuries might be recounted as little more than the extension of thermodynamics into nearly every branch of the natural sciences. As a result, he notes in Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (2014), the laws of thermodynamics are now recognised as the foundation of the other laws used in those branches. And so, the same basic laws that were first used to improve the efficiency of steam engines are now seen as the singular regulating principle of ‘all material systems’, as the biochemist Addy Pross puts it in What Is Life? (2012).
The acceptance of thermodynamics is so complete that Einstein believed it constituted ‘the only physical theory of universal content concerning which I am convinced that, within the framework of the applicability of its basic concepts, it will never be overthrown.’ He believed the laws of thermodynamics to be the ‘firm and definitive foundation for all physics, indeed for the whole of natural science.’
Through these laws, contemporary astrophysicists have been able to speculatively reconstruct the birth of our cosmos roughly 13.7 billion years ago and to speculatively account for the eventual collapse of our universe at the distant end of time. On a much smaller scale, biochemists and biophysicists have employed the laws of thermodynamics to explain how organic life first emerged from inorganic matter and why all living things must die.
Never have we had a more complete picture of reality than we do today. We now know that all we are and all that we do, indeed, all that anything can ever do, is entirely defined and circumscribed by the tendency towards entropic decay. The laws of thermodynamics encompass the whole of reality, from beginning to end, top to bottom, in origin, order and operation. We exist by virtue of heat exchange alone, and work entirely in service to the entropic decay of reality prescribed by that exchange.
Philosophers have been somewhat slow to address the thermodynamic revolution. Perhaps this is because contemporary philosophy is no longer content to be led by the methods and discoveries of the mathematical and material sciences.
In the past, philosophical metaphysics and the natural sciences circled one another like partners in an elaborate dance, each leaning upon the other and at times pushing or pulling its partner along as they both attempted to step lively to the rhythm of reality. Since Pythagoras, who is traditionally recognised as the first to coin the word philosophy, the natural and mathematical sciences were posited as the proper guide and escort of this complicated dance. Hence Plato’s enjoinder that those who sought to study the true form of being in his Academy must first familiarise themselves with mathematics and their practical application in the natural sciences. Supposedly, the inscription above the entrance to his Academy read: ‘Let no one enter who is ignorant of the study of geometry.’
The idea that philosophical speculation should be led by the mathematical and scientific survey of material reality governed metaphysics for the next 2,000 years, with few exceptions. However, in the past two centuries, a split has appeared between the mathematical and scientific study of the natural world and philosophical metaphysics. There are some notable exceptions to this general trend: philosophers who have earnestly endeavoured to keep up with the work of the natural sciences and to derive new metaphysical claims from this partnership.
The metaphysical, ethical and aesthetic implications of the thermodynamic revolution remain largely unexamined
Consider Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the first thinkers of the 19th century who saw the emerging thermodynamic revolution as a pathway to a new vision of the cosmos. What he saw was neither good nor evil, but simply a ‘monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms.’ However, Nietzsche seems to have overlooked the second and third laws of thermodynamics, which complicates (or nullifies) his optimism in the infinite creative potency of reality. The same could not be said for his contemporary Philipp Mainländer, who drew upon all three of the laws of thermodynamics to establish a metaphysical foundation for a new pessimistic philosophy. In the inevitable decay and destruction, Mainländer saw a new basis for the moral resignation and quietism dominating German intellectual circles at the time.
In the 20th century, thinkers like Isabelle Stengers and Bernard Stiegler have drawn upon the insights of the thermodynamic revolution to argue for what the former sees as the fundamental indeterminacy of reality and what the latter argues is the driving force of social and political developments since the Industrial Revolution. More recently, in the 21st century, Shannon Mussett has turned to the laws of thermodynamics to call for a new ‘ethics of care’ for our planet and for one another, which, she argues in Entropic Philosophy: Chaos, Breakdown, and Creation (2022), is justified in light of the necessary ‘fragility’ and ‘finitude’ of our entropic reality.
While such attempts to reckon with the existential implications of the thermodynamic revolution are significant, each has either failed to grasp its full philosophical significance or has neglected to develop a systematic account of reality grounded in this understanding. The philosophical task of reckoning with the full significance of the thermodynamic revolution therefore remains unfinished. But this is not unusual. Similar delays followed earlier scientific revolutions. Consider how Copernicus’s discovery that Earth orbits the Sun, published in the mid-16th century, remained largely undigested by philosophy until Immanuel Kant reframed it as a model for metaphysical thought in the late 18th century. In the same way, although the empirical content of the thermodynamic revolution has been absorbed by the sciences, its metaphysical, ethical and aesthetic implications remain largely unexamined. The task now is to continue this work.
For the better part of a decade, I have been reflecting on these oversights, attempting to reckon with the picture of reality granted to us by the thermodynamic revolution.
We must start by admitting that the Universe is finite and will eventually end. Moreover, we must accept that the function of the Universe is to hasten this extinction. The laws of thermodynamics reveal, in other words, that what we might view as the generative power of the Universe is instead bringing about the annihilation of everything: the flourishing of life is always contributing to the eventual collapse of the cosmos.
Even our Sun consumes itself in pursuit of this obliteration. When it dies in roughly 5 billion years, it will expand so much that Earth will be incinerated, and the solar system as we know it will come to an end. Until then, the Sun’s radiant energy will be collected and aggregated by plants that use it to further break down the latent chemical and material energy of our planet. The result of this photosynthetic process, leafy growth, is nothing more than a small contribution to the destruction of our planet. That means kale, spinach and lettuce are fractionally hastening the dissolution of Earth. And when we harvest, clean, eat and digest these entropic agents in the hope of sustaining ourselves, we only contribute further to the breakdown and dissipation of energy in our local environment. The theoretical physicist Sean Carroll has thus concluded that the ‘purpose of life’, from a thermodynamic perspective, might be summed up in a single word: metabolism, which he defines in The Big Picture (2016), as ‘essentially, “burning fuel”’. And to that end, as the biochemist Nick Lane puts it in The Vital Question (2016): ‘Life is not much like a candle; more of a rocket launcher.’
A metaphysics that responds to the full scope of the thermodynamic revolution needs to acknowledge the dissipative and destructive function lying behind the ‘generative’ force seemingly at work within reality. To do so requires moving from the classical optimistic metaphysics of becoming to a much more pessimistic metaphysics of absolute finitude and inescapable unbecoming: a metaphysics that reconceives of beings as nothing more than dissipative cogs in an annihilative machine.
From our human perspective, beings like ourselves might appear to proliferate and grow in complexity, seemingly working against the flow of entropy through the processes of birth, growth and regeneration. But in the fullness of time, this apparent generation and growth looks very different.
We can no longer think of existence as something organised towards our flourishing
Life is perhaps the most effective, albeit least obvious, consequence of and agent for thermodynamic decay in our immediate system, as the biophysicist Jeremy England has shown in his lab and the biologist Lynn Margulis has confirmed in field research with her son, Dorion Sagan. Everything in existence, including our species, both arises from and works in service to the destructive order of reality. Decay, it seems, is the ultimate essence of existence, which means that our being must be understood as a mode of unbecoming. It is but one additional way in which the ultimate annihilation of the Universe is accomplished.
A thermodynamically informed metaphysics of unbecoming demands that we also reconsider the moral value of the Universe. After all, if being is exclusively and entirely in the service of this unbecoming, we can no longer think of existence as something organised towards our flourishing. Reality is not good for us, as Plato and other philosophers insist. Instead, existence is fundamentally antagonistic and is actively working against itself in pursuit of total extinction. This is no kind of good.
Everything eats and is eaten. Everything destroys and is destroyed. Such is the inextricable order of the Universe. To sustain ourselves, we must consume and, in doing so, absorb, break down and dissipate our immediate surroundings in a process that necessarily contributes to their demise and our own. Such is the purpose, the metabolic function, of our lives from a thermodynamic perspective.
If any ethical meaning can be derived from what we now know concerning the nature of reality, it must be extracted from the fact that we are complicit in the universal unbecoming of our cosmos and exist solely to destroy our environs and ourselves in the process. It must also acknowledge the fact that, to the extent that any being has the distinct misfortune of being able to sense and respond to their thermodynamic destiny, they are doomed to experience rot, ruin, sickness and death: in a word, suffering.
No longer can we conceive of existence as something that is ultimately good. Nor can we conceive of it as something that is morally neutral, as others might have it. Instead, we must acknowledge that reality – which is organised antagonistically against all that it creates, and is the direct cause of the suffering of every entity it endows with consciousness – might be morally evil. If our existence means being forever at war with ourselves and our environs, and actively contributing to the suffering of everything we encounter along the way, then it is decidedly not good to be. Life is a moral catastrophe. To exist is to be unavoidably complicit in an order that is entirely evil.
What are we to do about this moral fact? Should we retire from existence as quickly and as peacefully as possible? Or is there another way? Could we, for example, begin to think of goodness not as something that exists in its own right, but that exists in relation to the moral order of the Universe and is defined negatively against the grain of the cosmos? Would goodness, then, be any attempt to resist the order, operation and end of reality?
If being complicit in the destructive flow of the Universe is evil, then goodness might be redefined as that which resists the nature and structure of reality, however futilely. Goodness could consist in any act that seeks, however briefly, to bend the entropic thrust of existence back upon itself – holding it at bay, even if only momentarily. We glimpse this resistance in acts of compassionate care for the suffering, and in efforts to minimise the harm we inflict on the world around us. Such efforts include adopting ways of living that reduce our consumption of the planet’s resources or, at the very least, lessen the suffering bound up in that consumption – through veganism, vegetarianism, or the choice to eat only animals raised in more humane and healthy conditions.
There are many ways in which we can further envision such an ethics of resistance, both personally and politically. Some of these we might unknowingly be doing already. Consider, for example, the practice of medicine that, while fully acknowledging the ultimate destiny of life (ie, death), nevertheless strives with tireless passion to delay the arrival of that destiny for as long as possible and to prescribe lifestyles that will enhance the quality of life in the meantime. This is a rather obvious good. What is less intuitive is that such efforts do not work in concert with nature. Medicine is not a way of affirming the intended direction of life and existence, and yet we think of the work that doctors do as ‘good’. What makes it good is precisely that it attempts to forestall, delay, slow down or put off what nature destines. In a similar way, every effort to work against and resist the entropic flow of reality must also count as good.
We should never strive to live in harmony with nature. To do so would make us complicit in an entirely evil system
Of course, all such efforts ultimately serve the entropic collapse of reality. If anything, by prolonging life, medicine ultimately increases the overall entropic potential of our planet – more people mean more bodies ‘burning fuel’. But it is in our efforts, not in our successes that we must look for moral goodness; in the same way that it is in our efforts to raise healthy and happy children that our success as parents must be judged, not our capacity to achieve these aims. Similarly, it can only be through our attempts to resist nature, to resist the entropic collapse of reality, that our standards of goodness might be set, not whether they are actually achievable.
Once we understand goodness as something that can be achieved only by resisting the order and operation of the cosmos in this way, we can begin to articulate an ethical system that takes seriously the insights of the thermodynamic revolution. To do good is not to work in concert with reality, nor should we ever strive to live in harmony with nature. This would make us complicit in an entirely evil system. To do good is to break with that complicity – to seek ways of dismantling, resisting and reconfiguring the structure of reality to neutralise, alleviate or unsettle its entropic thrust. Only by pursuing goodness negatively, through acts of refusal and resistance, can we hope to animate a new ethics within the metaphysics of decay.
Ultimately, such ethical pursuits are doomed. In a universe ruled by the laws of thermodynamics, all efforts to preserve life or protect sentient beings from nature’s destructive drift are destined to fail. This, however, should not prevent us from resisting.
What, then, are we to do? The only ‘ought’ we can tentatively derive from the vision of reality revealed by the thermodynamic revolution is this: it is our duty to strike back at the Universe. For it is precisely in the possibility of retaliating against the moral horror of existence that new ethical imperatives and aesthetic insights might be forged. Only by striving to break free from reality’s malign grip can we shape an ethics and aesthetics from the bleak metaphysics of entropic decay laid bare by contemporary science.
Drew M Dalton is an American philosopher and professor of English at Indiana University. He is the author of The Ethics of Resistance: Tyranny of the Absolute (2018) and The Matter of Evil: From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism (2023). He lives in Bloomington, Indiana, US.
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