We treat decay like a moral failure. As if rigor mortis is the body’s final act of cowardice. But rot is the only honest thing about us; the baseline truth beneath the Botox and the protein shakes and the desperate, greasy shine of midlife crisis sports cars.
I work in an office where everyone starves themselves into “wellness”, as if denying hunger could outwit entropy. People treat their bodies like stock portfolios.
“Invest in yourself!” they chirp, sucking down meal-replacement sludge. Meanwhile, my kitchen is a shrine to entropy, humming with evidence of surrender: half-fermented kimchi, peaches collapsing into syrup, and a food science experiment masquerading as yogurt.
Civilization is a collective delusion that we can outrun biology. Modernity tries to hide it. We freeze, we embalm, we inject formaldehyde into celebrities’ faces, we photoshop our corpses into perpetuity. But the flies always find the wound.
There’s a perverse freedom in it:
No matter how many marathons you run, how many vitamins you choke down, how many lovers whisper you’re timeless into your sweat-slick skin….
One day, your cells will shrug and quit.
One day, you’ll bloat. you’ll leak. you’ll stink.
Your synapses will fire their last half-formed thought.
And the world will spin on, unimpressed.