Efficiency is to do more with less, until we reach peak efficiency, when we can do everything with nothing.

Think galaxies. The energy radiates out, the structure coalesces in. We are a tiny little feedback loop in the middle. When we make it all about the information, we spiral into the black hole in the middle.

As these mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is as the present moving past to future.

Yet the evident reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Energy is conserved, because it manifests tis presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

The energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past.

Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past.

As lives go birth to death, future to past, as life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old, past to future.

The digestive system processes the energy, feeding the flame, the nervous system sorts the information, signals from the noise, while the circulation system is feedback in the middle.

So when everything is about processing information, it spirals down that rabbit hole, vortex, echo chamber, feedback loop in the middle.

Money functions as a social contract, a network, that enables complex economies to function, but we treat it as a commodity to mine from the economy, like gold from the ground, or bitcoin from computer processing.

It is a medium, like roads are a medium.

Markets need it to circulate, but people see it as signal to save and store. So Econ 101 calls it both medium of exchange and store of value.

Blood is a medium, fat is a store. Mix them up and see how long you live.

In order to store the asset side of the ledger, there has to be a debt to back it. Much of which is public debt, so the secret sauce of capitalism is mostly public debt backing private wealth.

So rather putting our efforts into creating healthy functional societies, with the necessary infrastructure and maintaining the environments to support them, we run up enormous debt, much of which is spent blowing up other countries, to sustain all this notional wealth.

Meanwhile we go spiraling down the drain.

https://johnbrodixmerrymanjr.medium.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-western-mind-906dc73cffe2