“You can’t stay where you are, because entropy will eat you. The structures you inhabit are always decaying…”
— Jordan B. Peterson


You wake up, you brush your teeth, you wait for the tea to cool down so you could take that first sip. It tasted the different than always. Not that it was unbearably awful, but enough to notice something wasn’t quite right. This is how it usually begins.

Hawking didn’t have to resort to complicated equations and theories. He saw the gap for what it was. Remove the science, and you can see the parallels in your own life.

There is this guy i know, working at an IT company. Let’s call him Mark. He’s had the same job for the past eighteen years, and he’s in his late forties. One morning he finds that his old notebook is missing some pages. Not that it had anything valuable in it, really. Only the ideas from his youth, which now seemed to dwindle away with every passing year. It was as if something inside him was bleeding out onto the paper.


Black holes are silent events really, swallowing everything whole, but giving off an occasional spark. Hope and despair are similar in that regard, bleeding out one’s soul, leaving behind only a wisp of warmth, if you know where to look.

Relationships does the same. She still smiles at her text messages from you, but the warmth is gone, sucked out along with your conversations on long evenings and mornings that stretch into afternoons. You can see it in the pauses between every sentence, the way your meals are becoming shorter and your nights stretch out unbearably long.

It’s the same with your parents. The father’s tales grow shorter with every visit, only the juicy bits repeated, the boring ones left out. He seems lighter somehow, despite reassurances from the doctors that it’s just old age. In your head, you know there isn’t much left to come. Every future plan is bled dry, leaving only evenings that stretch and nights that yawn at the prospect of conversation. Plans with him are only the odd silence or two between long stretches of nothingness.


You know what happens when you try to budget. The money is spent either on the bills and essentials or the fun stuff, but the happy part always disappears far too fast, bled into rent and medication. Something goes in, something always comes out, only one goes lower than the other. The big part is sucked down deep into the black hole of daily needs, while the little part goes away as the night terrors or nightmares you have every week.

Childhood begin so lively and full of plans, but you blink once, and everything changes. One day you’re talking to you about life, the next it’s short texts about meeting friends at the mall. You realize everything has dwindled, leaving only the occasional long hug goodbye, the texts getting shorter and shorter as their lives spiral out. The pull of life with its needs devours them, leaving you with only the wisp of their earlier selves. You know they were there, but what seems to come is something else entirely.


It happens to everybody. That’s why the small spark of the black holes isn’t a sign of hope, really. You see, the bigger part always disappears, leaving only a faint trace behind. It happens to your body right now, your memory bleeding out, and your strength going to other parts. One is permanently removed, while the other seems to only leave an imprint.

“It all goes away. Eventually, everything goes away.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert

Mark eventually left his job, sold most of his things, and moved to a smaller apartment. Last I heard, he was sitting outside, staring at the sky, waiting for something to happen. He didn’t look any different, except maybe a bit thinner.

The hole always takes its share, and it always wins.