Alex Towell

Posted on Oct 16 • Originally published at metafunctor.com

Orientation Under Pressure: Notes on a Life Lived Deliberately

#philosophy #ethics #legacy #civics

A reflection on living deliberately under constraint — on chemo cycles and chronic drag, on stoicism's hidden cost, on the privilege and responsibility of creation, and on why a life well-lived may simply be one where a vector was held steady against entropy.

Epigraph:
"If the ancients called it eudaimonia, we might call it simply: maintaining a vector under entropy."

1. Living Without Native Habitat

Some people move through the world as if tuned to a slightly different frequency. Not higher, not superior—simply out of phase with the prevailing rhythm. Most systems are built for throughput and predictability; they reward completion more reliably than emergence. Rough novelty is expensive to process because it forces context-switching and interpretive effort in lives already over-scheduled.

This isn't malice. It's attention economics. Recognition requires bandwidth, and bandwidth is scarce. What looks like indifference is often cognitive triage.

Recognizing this keeps orientation free of resentment and focuses attention on the real task: shaping signals that can actually be received—or at least archived for later discovery.

Example: You present a rough but original idea and get polite silence; a polished incremental piece draws nods.
Counterweight: People are overloaded—novel frames demand scarce time they may not have.

2. Entropy, Illness, and the Shape of Time

Systems decay by default. In thermodynamics, this is the second law. In human life, suffering functions as entropy: illness, poverty, grief, political instability, financial strain, bureaucracy, exhaustion—catastrophe or attrition, the effect is similar: direction dissolves if unattended.

Viktor Frankl, writing from Auschwitz, identified meaning-making as the ultimate human freedom under constraint. What he didn't say—what camp survivors rarely had luxury to say—is that meaning-making requires margin. Time. Cognitive space. The ability to think past tomorrow.

In my case, that pressure has taken the form of chronic illness and recurring chemo cycles. A year and a half ago I was given roughly a year to live. That deadline has already passed.

Chemo—like any condition that fractures time—turns productivity into a punctuated rhythm: windows of clarity, then enforced repair. The disability justice community calls this "crip time"—time that refuses the fiction of continuity, time that bends around bodies instead of demanding bodies bend around it. Calendars assume continuity; bodies impose cycles.

The practical question becomes: Can orientation survive interruption?

I continue—not as performance, but as a simple choice to maintain a vector when the horizon collapses. Some days that vector is a single paragraph. Other days, a proof sketch or a cleaned-up function. The metric isn't volume. It's non-collapse.

Example: On low days, reading a paragraph feels uphill; on clear days, the mind lunges for the unfinished proof, tool, or paragraph.
Counterweight: From the outside, oscillation is invisible—shared calendars flatten cycles into checkboxes.

Example (others): For one person, entropy is a border crossing under shelling; for another, a decade of paperwork that keeps life on hold.
Counterweight: Often this is structural, not malicious—systems are tuned to the average case, not the exception.

Privilege clause: The very capacity to think in terms of "orientation" or "legacy" assumes margin—space above survival mode. Many lives are consumed entirely by immediate threat. That absence is not moral failure; it's the world denying bandwidth. Where margin exists, it should be carried with quiet responsibility.

3. Stoicism and Its Side Effect

Epictetus: "It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters."

True enough. Stoicism teaches endurance without spectacle and keeps identity from being annexed by suffering. Practiced long enough, though, it can normalize silence. Social equilibria form where everyone saves time—and you carry more weight alone.

Susan Sontag warned against the metaphorical annexation of illness—the way cancer becomes "battle" and patients become "fighters," as if dying were a moral failure. But there's a quieter annexation: when resilience becomes your brand, people stop asking how you are. The system adapts. You say "fine," and the work moves another inch.

Naming this helps prevent quiet isolation from becoming the default.

Example: People praise your resilience, then stop asking how you are; you say "fine," and move the work another inch.
Counterweight: It isn't cruelty so much as bandwidth management—but the isolation is real.

4. Legacy Over Career

A career climbs within frameworks; a legacy leaves coordinates beyond them.

Institutions must measure promotions and predictable outputs. This is rational—organizations require metrics. But archives often remember artifacts that change how someone thinks, not the ones that hit KPIs.

David Graeber wrote about how much labor is dedicated to producing the appearance of productivity—reports no one reads, metrics that measure compliance rather than impact. The résumé is an artifact of institutional accounting, not of intellectual transmission.

To create—writing, code, theory, tools—is to emit small signals against erasure. Most vanish; a few become anchors for the next traveler. The ethic is transmission attempted, not impact guaranteed.

Maintenance as creation: Mierle Laderman Ukeles, in her 1969 "Manifesto for Maintenance Art," argued that maintenance work—cleaning, repair, care—is itself creative and resistant. Keeping a system running is a form of making, especially when that system is your own orientation under pressure.

Example: A promotion is logged in HR; a single function, diagram, or paragraph may be rediscovered decades later as a coordinate.
Counterweight: Organizations track measurables because they must govern; faint, future-facing artifacts are harder to score.

Entropy erases by default. Creation, where possible, is resistance.

5. Structure, Civics, and the Banality of Evil

Abstraction is fragile without civic scaffolding, and structure is not morally neutral.

Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" names a mechanism we still live with: great harm can be produced by ordinary procedure—obedience, role fidelity, distance from consequences. In such contexts, "just doing your job" becomes a moral abdication, because disconnection is the instrument.

Modern America offers live examples:

Deportation-by-procedure — families separated not by hatred but by workflow optimization
Algorithmic denials — benefits rejected by models trained on historical bias, encoded as "fairness"
Automated records purges — archives emptied "in accordance with retention policy," memory erased per statute

This is what Paul Farmer and Johan Galtung called structural violence: harm embedded in systems, scaled by routine, invisible to those operating the levers.

An oriented life therefore includes refusals—small disobediences that reattach action to consequence. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney write about "the undercommons"—the spaces where refusal happens not as spectacle but as quiet non-compliance with extractive logics.

And it includes a civic ethic that defends preservable domains: free speech, archives, plural institutions, due process. Legacy depends on these domains to remain legible to the future.

Example: A file is processed exactly as policy dictates; a person disappears between offices.
Counterweight: Workers are meeting metrics inside incentives they didn't design—which is precisely why design and accountability matter.

6. The Measure of a Life

Titles and counts assume stable conditions. They measure accumulation, not orientation. A better metric under constraint:

Did you maintain a vector under pressure?
Did you create when silence would have been easier?
Did you refuse when compliance would have scaled harm?

Rebecca Solnit writes that hope is not optimism—it's the recognition that uncertainty means possibility. Orientation under entropy is similar: not faith that things improve, but commitment to direction despite collapse.

A life lived well isn't pain-free or bureaucracy-free. It is one where direction did not dissolve into drift, despite systemic incentives to give in.

Example: On a bad week, you ship a tiny bug fix or a paragraph edit instead of nothing—the vector survived.
Counterweight: Metrics tuned for volume may miss this; understandable, but incomplete.

7. Closing

Time is uncertain. Cycles of pain, fatigue, and administrative drag will continue. The world won't re-time itself to your body. Systems won't redesign themselves around exceptions.

Orientation remains possible.

A few deliberate artifacts—clear, unpanicked, aimed at futures you won't see—can outlast noise. Some will dissolve. A few might become coordinates.

If something wiser than us ever looks back, it likely won't count comfort or status. It will ask:

Did you keep a vector under entropy?

If yes, that was deliberate enough.

Long Echo — on archive-minded creation and time-delayed impact
Post-ASI Archaeology — on leaving legible structures for descendants (human or machine)
On Moral Responsibility — metaphysical examination of freedom and determinism

References & Further Reading

Cited directly or indirectly:

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition (1958)
Epictetus. Discourses and Selected Writings
Farmer, Paul. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (2003)
Frankl, Viktor. Man's Search for Meaning (1946)
Galtung, Johan. "Violence, Peace, and Peace Research" (1969)
Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018)
Moten, Fred & Harney, Stefano. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013)
Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (2004)
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor (1978)
Ukeles, Mierle Laderman. "Manifesto for Maintenance Art" (1969)