Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.
Henry Adams
Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.
Will Durant
We adore chaos because we love to produce order.
M. C. Escher
The War for Order
I read a lot about ancient history. I’m super fascinated with how people saw the world back before we had an idea of the whole world. Lately, I’ve been obsessed with the early Holocene and what they call the megafauna (a $10 word for big-ass animals) of North America. It’s really cool stuff. Look up the Short-Faced Bear to see what our ancestors had to deal with.
I’m reading through the Old Testament with a Cultural Backgrounds Bible right now. It takes everything in the Biblical narrative and places it in the much wider context of the Mesopotamian world around it and shows how it all relates. It’s also really cool stuff.
For all the different cultures and locations, one theme that keeps popping up is humanity's need to make order from chaos. In Genesis, God brings order out of the chaos by creating everything. This is mirrored by other creation narratives as other creator figures did the same. Nature seemed chaotic and terrifying to ancient people, and for good reason.
I know we tend to see nature as having an order these days, but a lot of that is a result of a technological privilege that allows us to observe nature without all the risks inherent in actually dealing with nature. It makes it seem a lot safer than it is. This is why we get to see so many videos of idiots getting rag dolled by bison at Yellowstone.
To ancient people, things like storms, famines, plagues, and predators represented real threats to their lives, embodying the chaos they wanted to avoid. It's cool to watch the storm through the windows in your sturdy house or watch nature documentaries on the BBC. It's harder to recognize and appreciate the inherent order in something when it's trying to kill you.
Ancient people also saw their rulers as representatives of the gods and, therefore, the first line of defense against chaos. They were often seen as having a divine mandate to do this, with some rulers even being seen as representatives or children of the gods, if not actual Gods themselves.
A lot of ancient customs and rituals don't make much sense to us. Many seem downright oppressive until you view them through the lens of trying to preserve a tenuous order so that they could stave off the deadly chaos that was natural to reality. We tend to see order as being more natural than it is because most of us live in stable societies where things work as they should. We see car wrecks and the electricity going out as a break in the order when we should probably be surprised and grateful that these things don't happen more often than they do.
We also tend to see ourselves as being advanced far beyond our stupid, simple ancestors, but if I had to boil it all down, most of the coaching I do with people revolves around helping them reduce the amount of chaos in their lives by imposing healthy order where we can. This is never clearly stated, but it's what we're really talking about. Our ancestors saw chaos as a threat to life itself; in modern times, chaos be the thing that most often keeps us from having the life we want.
In many ways, our ancestors were correct. Chaos seems to be the norm. Glasses fall off tables and break; they never reassemble themselves and jump back onto tables. Left untended, homes become messy, cars break down, and fires burn until there's nothing left to burn. An untended mind runs amok.
In short, doing nothing leads to chaos. Order requires energy and intention.
I get. Some degree of chaos is necessary. We all need to change and grow. We don't evolve if we stagnate, but too much chaos is destructive and debilitating. I learned this hard by living a chaotic life for a long time. It brought me a lot of difficulty.
Here are five simple ways you can reduce the chaos in your world.
Standard Social Media Disclaimer: None of these are hard and fast rules, none of them are magic bullets, and none of them will apply to everybody. We all have different obstacles and inherent limitations; look at what you can do and leave the rest. Don’t message me about that one person you know who can’t make their bed because it’s pressed up against the wall and they aren’t strong enough to pull it out or whatever.
Make Your Bed
I make my bed first thing every morning, but this is a stand-in for the larger idea of cleaning up your space.
Making your bed each morning is good in and of itself, though. Part of the way I reduce chaos in my mornings is to have a routine. I get up at 4:45, turn on the heat in my sunroom so I can work, start my green tea (coffee is out because of my thyroid), fill up my water bottle, and then I make my bed.
I didn’t want to believe this, but disorder in our exterior world leads to disorder in our interior world. Something as simple as taking 15 or 20 minutes a day to pick up the house and taking a few minutes in the evening to stack my papers up and save and close Word files makes the day feel more organized and easy.
Don't be crazy about this. I have an 8-year-old, and a 3-year-old. Our house gets messy. We don't go through the drive-through very often, so I do a lot of dishes. I pick things up as I can, but I don't let it dominate my awareness or turn into annoyance or resentment. I have my sunroom I work in; I keep that clean because that's within my control.
Get yourself in the habit of reducing the chaos in your physical environment, and you'll find that it pays off for you in other ways.
Tame Your Desires
Human desire represents one of the more chaotic influences in the world. We've all seen it. When somebody really wants something, they can get to chasing it in a way where all their reason and other priorities can go right out the window if they're not careful. Maybe you've been that person. I have.
This is especially problematic in a world where we can have almost anything we want if we've got enough money and where there are complex, super-intelligent algorithms monitoring everything we look at online to try to match us up with the next object of our desire. If the desire catches us unaware, we may not even stop to think about the potential consequences of having it.
I always tell people I'm lucky because I don't want much. I drive an old truck with an adapter in the tape deck that lets me listen to my audiobooks while driving. I have a Kindle and buy books for it when I want to. I buy a few Magic the Gathering cards each month, and I'm pretty happy.
I'm fortunate that there aren't many things that grab my attention, but I've also worked to cultivate this over the years by recognizing that wanting something doesn't mean it's good for me. I've had a lot of painful lessons throughout my life about the problems that sometimes come with getting what we want.
This has been especially helpful with my wife and me being in industries that do not guarantee a steady paycheck. The real estate market is up and down. Life coaching is up and down. Our bills are not up and down. We have a fixed quantity going out and a fluctuating quantity coming in. This would introduce excessive chaos into our lives if we did not have a handle on the desire side of things.
Budgeting My Time
We all know we're supposed to budget our money. Budgeting our money is a good thing. That alone can remove some chaos from our lives. The thing is, money comes and money goes, and you can't buy all the things that bring true joy to our lives anyway.
There's always more money; there's never more time.
When the money runs out, you're broke.
When the time runs out, you're dead.
One of these is more serious than the other.
I always find that unbudgeted time is taken from me in one way or another. For all our modern conveniences, we have tacked on a million modern tasks. Those little tasks sneak in and take over when I don't budget my time. This is especially easy when you don't budget your time in a way to take care of the things you need to take care of but don't necessarily want to do. It's amazing how important the dishes or cleaning the garage become to me when it's time to sit down and do some of the administrative tasks that I hate so much.
That's exactly why budgeting our time is so important and can reduce the chaos in our lives. When you don't take care of the larger and more long-term tasks, they are panic-inducng when they come due. When you don't budget your time to take care of the important things, it's easy to say yes to all the little coffee dates and new shows on Netflix that pop up on you.
Emergencies that you didn't plan for will come up. There's chaos we can minimize and control, and then there's chaos that we cannot. I often see that the people who manage the chaos they can control are much less likely to get sunk by the emergencies they cannot control.
It's like money. People who don't manage their money are in trouble when something goes wrong with their car. The people who are diligent about maintaining order in their finances won't like it, but they can handle the emergency when it arises.
Block things off on your schedule. Treat the things you need to do with the awareness and respect they deserve. If you manage the small chaos that is normal to life - keeping up with your bills, keeping up with your chores, taking time for the people you need to take time for, running errands when they need to be run - they won't be competing for your time when the inevitable emergencies arise.
Removing Chaotic People
Look, I get it. We need to be kind to people. We need to have compassion for them. We need to try to help others and take care of each other. I agree with this and give a lot of my time to other people to do those things.
There are people who have acclimated to chaos to the degree they don't know how to live their lives outside of it, though. I was one of them. There are toxic people who don't care how their chaos affects you. There are people who are so self-absorbed that they don't even realize that they're introducing chaos into your life. There are people who think it's funny to make their mess your mess and will do it as often as you allow them to.
These people will always introduce chaos into your life and destroy the order you have created. You do not have the energy or willpower or ability to prevent their chaos from becoming your chaos if you allow them to remain a close relationship in your life.
Draw boundaries and protect yourself from other people's chaos. Being a martyr sounds fun until you remember that you have to die first.
Remove/Reduce Intoxication
I know, this is a killjoy. I don't have any sort of moral problem with people being intoxicated. I spent a good part of my life drinking a lot. It got me in a lot of trouble. I got it under control and spent another good part of my life drinking socially. The social drinking never caused me any real trouble outside of wasted time and foggy days, but it never did me any good, either.
Here's the thing. When I talk to people whose lives have a lot of chaos, they almost always spend some amount of their time intoxicated, and that amount of time tends to compound into further problems for them. It can be something as serious as a drug charge or a DWI or something as simple as being exhausted every day because they stay up too late drinking and watching Family Guy while alcohol destroys their REM cycle, but the problems are there.
Here's another funny thing. When I work with super high-functioning people, the one area of disorder in their lives almost always revolves around intoxication (mostly alcohol because it's our most legal and socially acceptable drug). Across the board, they can tell me how alcohol complicates their lives and they know they should remove it.
Here's the last thing. People who do remove the sources of intoxication from their lives all tell me about a noticeable improvement across their entire lives. They sleep better, so they get more done, and they're in a better mood. They spend less money, so their finances are more in order. They don't get into as many dust-ups with the people closest to them, and they don't forget things as often. They start to find a healthier balance in their lives, and healthier people tend to want to spend more time with them.
None of this is meant to be judgmental. I genuinely don't have a moral stance on these kinds of things. I'm documenting what I've seen in my life and in other people's lives. It's so noticeable to me now that having any kind of intoxication in my life doesn't seem like it's worth the hassle.
Part of what we like about intoxication is the little bit of chaos it introduces. We call it taking the edge off, but we're really talking about dulling our senses and caring a little bit less about things for a little while. As I said at the beginning, imposing order requires energy and intention. When our energy and intention are dispersed because of some substance, that little bit of chaos we're allowing starts to grow. Especially if we do it day after day.
A quick caveat here: It's fine if people want to have a few drinks every now and then, this is true for a lot of other substances as well. But, this caveat has a caveat: some people can't do that, and every-once-in-a-while turns into every-other-day until it turns into every day. People like that should stay away from intoxicating substances.
If you want to have a few drinks or a few something-elses, that's cool. Just be honest with yourself about what comes with it.
Less Chaos
You don't need to worry about reducing the chaos in your life to such a degree that nothing ever changes. Being alive will introduce enough disorder and change to keep you growing and evolving every single day. You do need to be careful about being so attached to order that you spend all your time clutching at it or become unable to tolerate disorder when it shows up.
The key is to impose healthy order where you can and to the things that matter. When we minimize the controllable chaos, the uncontrollable chaos is a lot less of a problem. It's kind of like stress. We all need a healthy degree of stress if we are going to learn or do anything new, and there's a fine line between the stress that helps us grow and the stress that paralyzes us.
Imposing order in small ways takes a lot of the guesswork out of what we're doing and helps us be ready for the next big thing life throws at us.
And life will throw things at us.
It’s what it does.
Thanks for taking the time to read these things I write.
James