Bohemianism and Entropy

Things fall apart ... don't worry about it.

All of life falls into disrepair without constant maintenance: hair grows, teeth decay, ideas stagnate, stomachs rumble, clothes fray, and dust mounts. Entropy—the universal law that things fall apart—is everywhere. The question is: how do you deal with it?

The answer given by advertising, the media, and the high street is to become an obsessive compulsive. How else can we explain the modern world of cleaning products and plastic surgery? This is a bizarre world where airbrushed models smile cutely behind gleaming facades in order to sell a dream of a world without entropy to the blotchy masses. Go on, they say, keep adding fuel to the furnace of capitalism! Buy disposable clothes! Buy crappy furniture! Waste your time with flashy gadgets! Don’t grow old! Don’t let entropy take over!

Yet, entropy — death, decay, and disillusion — always does take over. To fight it is to wage a banal and unwinnable war. Why not, instead, accept that the universe is entropic and find ways to make life more interesting? This is the bohemian way.

Bohemianism is, in essence, an attitude towards entropy. Bohemians ignore the petty niceties of bourgeois life in order to follow their own path. They realise that mindless maintenance is a waste of time (who cares about unpaid bills and squalor?) preferring to create things of beauty than endure a life of banality.

Of course, one cannot become a bohemian by making lifestyle choices, but there are a set of priorities that seem to be consistently present:

Experimentation

The bohemian is an experimentalist, someone who learns what is truly important by trying things out. Maybe they’ve tried having a gleaming house, why not try having a messy house and see if it makes any difference. Observe and learn.

Wabi Sabi

This is a Japanese concept that some things can become more beautiful with age, as the cracks and imperfections give them character. Think of a good quality pan that resonates with the taste of a thousand meals. If you need to buy something, buy quality rather than disposable plastic crap.

Irresponsibility

Reduce responsibilities. The ability to do nothing is crucial because The opposite of nothing is not something, it is stress. People are far more productive when they don’t have to do boring maintenance, when they aren’t in thrall to what other people or society think about them. So give up things that you don’t care about that you are only doing because you think you ought to.

Animality

So-called normality has become antiseptic, routinized and oppressively ordered. Daily showers make us sensitive to smell, incapable of being at one with another fleshy human being. We need to eat, drink and fuck; the mind is designed to “enjoy its pleasures” via the neurochemicals dopamine and serotonin. Unfortunately our desires have been perverted by advertising, addicting us us to junk food, caffeine and pornography. We are slaves to a brain that acts as though the world weren’t overwhelmed with temptation. Modern culture enslaves most of the population by preying upon its desires. Avoid it.

This article was originally published in issue five of New Escapologist magazine.

Read my other New Escapologist articles.