The Temperature of Ideas: Our Strange Labor to Stay Different

I've been thinking about something lately that makes my heart feel heavy in a way I can't quite explain — the way living things have to fight against the universe's slow descent into sameness. There's something devastatingly beautiful about how our bodies wage this quiet physical cage-fight against entropy, maintaining our 98.6 degrees like Superman's fortress against the cold. We're these brief, warm miracles in an indifferent cosmos. And then one day we stop fighting. In moments the heat seeps out of us and we surrender to the temperature of everything else, like a candle softly sighing and letting its flame go dark. When I learned about this I sat with my palms pressed against my throat for a long time, feeling the warmth there, thinking about how my body performs this endless labor of staying alive, of staying different, of staying me.

This moment of reflection flickered to life from a surprising parallel between biological entropy and human creativity courtesy of Richard Dawkins' "The Blind Watchmaker." Dawkins observes that living things must constantly work to maintain their distinction from their environment – our bodies stay warmer than their surroundings only through continuous effort. "When we die," he writes, "the work stops, the temperature differential starts to disappear, and we end up the same temperature as our surroundings."

Stay with me, but my insomnia wakes me up nightly and I can't go back to sleep so this biological principle led to a match-strike paradox that John Gardner identified when speaking to a room of McKinsey consultants in the '90s. Why, he wondered, as I myself pondered at 3am in a very David Byrne-ian "how did I get here?”, why do some people "go to seed" while others remain vital throughout their lives? His answer wasn't about success or achievement – the things his audience had ostensibly 'mastered'. Instead, he identified something more fundamental: the difference between being interesting and being interested.

"Everyone wants to be interesting," Gardner observed, "but the vitalizing thing is to be interested."

"Everyone wants to be interesting, but the vitalizing thing is to be interested."

Sometimes I obsess and self-interrogate if our desperate attempts to stay interesting are making us lose what made us interesting in the first place. When I'm staring at my phone screen, watching everyone try so hard to be special that we're all starting to look the same. We have the 'hottest AI models', shiny new toys that promise to make us unique - AI that can write like anyone, pre-engineered prompts that make us all look as perfect as K-drama heroines, the new Serena, Blair and Nate. But doesn't it feel like we're all just becoming beautiful copies of copies of copies? Like we're all posting the same dreamy creamy generative AI images and performing the same carefully curated type of I-woke-up-like-this™ messy authenticity.

Sometimes I catch myself doing it too - reaching for the tool that will make me sound smarter when writing the third dozen of performance reviews or just seem more... alive. And I feel an ache in my chest for all the rough edges we're smoothing away.

Maybe being truly interesting isn't about being polished or perfect or even original. Maybe it's about being willing to be warm and strange and human in a freezing February in Brooklyn that keeps trying to make us ambient room temperature.

This tax of maintaining distinctiveness is like a secret second job. A grinding labour our bodies do to stay warmer than their surroundings – a perpetual resistance against the equalizing ocean currents of entropy.

This isn't just a biological truth but a cultural one too. I read about a couple whose relationship includes a running inside joke where the husband playfully messes with his wife, "Can't you just be normal?" Their shared laughter contains a deeper recognition – that distinctiveness, while precious, requires continuous burning of emotional and literal calories. Being "normal" would be easier, but it would mean surrendering something... vital.

I keep thinking about what it means to feel stuck in a world that never stops moving. Isn't it strange how we can spend years drowning in Zoom meetings and deadlines and Slack notifications but still feel this hollow emptiness behind our eyes? Like we're all just going through the motions, performing an elaborate dance of productivity while our souls quietly calcify.

I was talking to a tourist wearing Comme des Garçons and scuffed Margiela tabis on the subway the other day about how weird it is that we have more ways to be creative than ever - AI that can paint like George Rouy, algorithms that can write like Isabella DeSendi, tools that can turn our boldest dreams into perfect pitch decks - but somehow we feel less and less alive.

We're all so busy making things, endless streams of content and campaigns and posts, but when was the last time you felt that electric spark of genuine curiosity on your daily commute? Or that middle-of-the-night feeling where you can't sleep because you're too excited about an idea? Sometimes I stress out because we're trading that raw, messy wonder for a kind of polished emptiness. Like we're all becoming these perfect professional machines, optimized for output but slowly forgetting how to want things just because they're beautiful or strange or true. Remember when we used to ask questions just because we wanted to know the answer?

Clearly, I've been thinking about entropy maybe too much. About how the universe always wants things to fall apart, to settle into the easiest possible state. Doesn't that feel terrifyingly familiar when you look at the state of everything?

Democracy isn't our natural state - it's this fragile, precious thing we have to keep choosing, keep protecting, keep believing in even when it would be so much easier to let it all collapse into the historical default of someone telling us what to do.

And maybe that's true about being alive too, about being an actual person instead of just a collection of carefully curated posts and AI-generated thoughts and algorithm-friendly personality traits.

It’s always 4am and I'm lying awake thinking about how hard it is to stay real, to stay curious, to keep caring about things that don't optimize well for engagement. The internet wants us to be smooth and easy and digestible, like those AI girlfriends certain magazines love to profile, who never disagree with you, who never have a bad day or an uncomfortable opinion or a moment of genuine strangeness. But isn't that exactly what makes us human? Our rough edges, our weird obsessions, the way we can spend hours reading about something totally useless just because it makes our hearts feel full to almost bursting?

Sometimes I wonder if this is the real work of being alive right now - not just posting or producing or performing, but actually maintaining our humanity against the entropy of algorithms. Like democracy, like love, like everything worth having, staying strange and real and truly interested is a choice we have to keep making every single day.

And maybe that's exhausting, but isn't it also kind of beautiful? This quiet rebellion of caring too much about the wrong things, of staying warm when the world wants us to cool down, of remaining stubbornly, imperfectly human in an increasingly frictionless world?

This is where Gardner's insight about ambition becomes beyond relevant. Ambition alone, he says, eventually wears out. It drives us to be interesting, to stand out, to achieve. But interest – true curiosity – is what keeps us vital.

In the age of AI, this distinction becomes even more critical. While artificial intelligence can help us appear more interesting, it cannot be interested for us. That vital spark of curiosity – the desire to discover, to learn, to engage deeply with the world – remains uniquely human.

I found a dead moth on top of an old Rick Owens sweater this morning and I haven't been able to stop thinking about what makes something alive. Not just breathing or moving or going viral on TikTok, but really, truly alive.

Gardner talks about curiosity like it's a kind of sacred flame - not the fake kind we perform for likes or followers, but the real kind that keeps you up at night, that makes you forget to eat because you're too busy learning about medieval falconry techniques or the secret language of newly laid-off tech workers. Do you remember being that kind of alive? That kind of interested in things?

It's harder now, isn't it? The algorithms want us to be interesting but not interested. They want us to be these perfect little content machines, always producing, always engaging, always optimized. But never too weird, never too deep, never too real. It's like we're all these beautiful butterflies pinned under glass - perfectly preserved but not quite alive anymore.

But here's the thing about being alive: it's not supposed to be efficient. It's messy and wasteful and constantly working against the grain of the universe. Our bodies burn so much energy just to stay warm, just to stay different from the air around them. And maybe our minds need to do the same thing - burn energy, waste time, follow strange paths that don't lead anywhere... marketable.

I've been trying to practice this lately. To let myself care too much about things that don't matter. To ask questions that make people uncomfortable at dinner parties. To stay warm and weird and wondering in a world that keeps trying to cool us all down to room temperature.

Sometimes I think that's what life is - not just surviving, but maintaining this foot-stompingly stubborn, inefficient, beautiful differentness. Like a butterfly beating its wings against the fat exhaust pipe of a Fast and the Furious wannabe, like a democracy refusing to fall forty-seven stories down into tyranny, like a six year old’s heart refusing to stop being curious about this strange, terrible, wonderful world.