loading . . . Life is supposed to be pleasurable Adrian Bejan’s Constructal Law is something I keep thinking about. It states:
> For a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve in such a way that it provides easier access to the currents that flow through it.
Much of Bejan’s investigations have been about documenting instances of the Constructal Law in natural processes; it’s an elegant theoretical basis for predicting the allowed evolutionary pathways that ultimately produce the natural and organic structures that we find beautiful.
Now, not to take too enormous a logical leap, but, as I have started to argue elsewhere (and would like someday to finish that argument), I believe that beauty is more than an aesthetic experience of highly-intelligent beings. Rather, it’s a relational encounter between parts of a system that is evolving, as the Constructal Law states, towards more ease-of-flow. The experience of beauty is a retrospective signal that the system is evolving in such a way that allows it to persist in time; that is, to live.
This interpretation implies a profound truth—that when we perceive beauty, we are recognizing the conditions of our flourishing. If we pay attention, we can understand how to nurture and tend to those conditions and add to the sum total of aliveness of our world.
Many of my friends, being in the world of software development, are very aware of the architect Christopher Alexander, from his development of the idea of design patterns. Most of them have not encountered his later work, _The Nature of Order_ —a four-volume magnum opus that laid out a theoretical framework for what he called “aliveness” or just “life” in designed structures. In this work, he described 15 properties of living structure. Until I read about the Constructal Law, I found myself unable to relate to Alexander’s use of the word “life”—I knew that he meant it as more than just hyperbole, but I couldn’t quite grasp why these properties in particular were seen in so-called “living structure”.
I now understand it as follows: Alexander was throughout his career describing design processes that were iterative and evolutionary, where the resulting structure was to belong harmoniously, and to “help” its local environment. Because he was an architect, he mostly addresses the design processes leading up to the creation of a building or a campus. But he also always talks about how a building or an object evolves in use, and evolves the functions of the space it inhabits. These processes, to me, are analogous to what Bejan describes in the Constructal Law: the building evolves, in use, always to provide “easier access to the flows”.
To Alexander, beauty was also a sign of this “aliveness”. I now understand that his 15 properties of living structure can be seen as the results of Constructal evolutionary processes, and that he and Bejan were barking up the same tree.
Connecting these dots has given me a lot of hope and peace; moreover, it has given me an aesthetic heuristic to understand if things are going well for a system, whether that be a process in my workplace, a relationship, or the broader arc of my life. Do I perceive beauty and ease unfolding? If yes, what conditions are supporting the unfolding of that beauty? If no, what _would_ be a beautiful that could evolve from here? What conditions would support _that_?
Life is supposed to be full of beauty; that is what it seeks. Be a vessel for that beauty to come into being. https://exitmusic.world/life-is-supposed-to-be-pleasurable
