The Law of Reversal
The Way Up Is the Way Down
“The way up and the way down are one and the same.” —Heraclitus
Last week I went to see an orthopedic surgeon. A nagging shoulder–elbow issue I’m trying to sort out. That same evening, an ad popped up on Facebook: a Free Shoulder Rehab Masterclass. Like magic!
Except it wasn’t magic. It was machines noticing a detail in my life that I hadn’t told anyone outside the clinic—my shoulder pain—and mirroring it back to me in the form of a targeted pitch. A coincidence? Maybe. But when the “coincidences” pile up, you start to feel less like a person browsing freely and more like a character in a script someone else is writing.
There’s something undeniably impressive about how advertising has become hyper-personal. But it’s a Catch-22—just like AI. Companies now seem to know us, our families, even our moods, better than we know ourselves. They map not just what we say but what we hesitate over, what we almost click, what we dream about at midnight.
That knowledge creates convenience, yes—but it also creates dependency. And we know how dangerous that gets when the balance of power tilts too far. Yet many of us, myself included, prefer to look away, trusting in the corporate version of “do no harm” and hoping for the best.
But harm is baked into the business model. We all know this. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, makes almost all its revenue from advertising—over 97% of its revenue came from selling targeted ads fueled by user data. It doesn’t just know what you post; it watches what you read, what you search, what you pause on, and what you scroll past with a twitch.
In 2021, researchers estimated Facebook stored over 52,000 data points on each user. That’s not just knowing your birthday and hometown—that’s knowing when you’re likely to be lonely, when you’re most willing to spend, and which insecurities can be pressed to make you click. Our attention isn’t the byproduct. Our attention is the product.
AI, meanwhile, I’ve been treating like a toy—much as I once treated the early internet. Is it foolish? Probably, but I still play. I toss it random questions, test half-baked ideas, see what comes back. Last week I asked it, “Can you give me a review of the Ages over the last 200 years?”
It delivered a tidy lecture: the Industrial Age, the Age of Empire, the Age of Conflict, the Cold War, the Digital Age, the Information Age. Then came the sweeping themes—technological progress, globalization, social change, conflict, environment. Tidy and hollow.
So I pressed: “What’s the pattern?”
Its reply: “Accelerating cycles of innovation, disruption, and adaptation.”
A bunch of buzzwords.
To prove its point, it rattled off a technological timeline: steam → electricity → computers → AI. Each, it claimed, was a step in progress—faster, more transformative, a natural evolution.
But AI is built on human logic, and human logic has its blind spots. Steam and electricity aren’t in the same category as computers and AI. The first two generate energy; the second two consume it. “That’s a reversal in energy flow,” I told the AI.
To my surprise, it paused, then conceded. “You’re right—a complete switcheroo!”
And that’s when it hit me: maybe the past two centuries don’t divide into six neat “ages” at all. Maybe there are only two—the Age of Energy Creation, and the Age of Energy Consumption.
Steam and electricity created a surplus of energy, distributing it into every corner of life—factories, railroads, homes. Civilization was rewired by abundance.
Computers and AI, by contrast, don’t make energy—they devour it. Training a single large AI model can consume as much electricity as 100 U.S. households in a year. Multiply that across industries, across nations, and the hunger becomes insatiable.
Money itself can follow the same pattern. Cryptocurrency doesn’t just store value—it burns energy to exist. A single dollar sits quietly; crypto needs vast computational power just to survive. It’s a perfect illustration of reversal taken to extremes: what should be inert becomes voracious, turning abundance into consumption, and creation into depletion.
And here lies the paradox: the very technologies designed to make us more efficient now threaten to overwhelm the systems they rely on.
The nineteenth century was about making energy. The twentieth and twenty-first are about burning through it. The catalyst? Credit. Debt. The pulling forward of tomorrow’s resources to fuel today’s growth. It flipped abundance into dependency—and made collapse not an accident, but a certainty waiting its turn.
A Universal Law
The shift from energy creation to energy consumption is not just a quirk of human history. It reflects a deeper law of reality itself: enantiodromia—a term the philosopher Heraclitus used to describe the way things, when pushed far enough, reverse into their opposites. The Greeks saw it everywhere: day into night, summer into winter, life into death.
On the largest scale, the universe demonstrates this law. Stars spend millions of years blazing outward in unimaginable triumph—burning, creating, radiating. Yet when the fuel is spent, the very energy that made them radiant turns inward. They collapse into dwarfs, neutron stars, or, at the extreme, black holes: light itself swallowed. Creation flips into consumption. Expansion becomes implosion.
The cosmos obeys enantiodromia. Even black holes, the apparent negation of existence, obey the law. At the point of greatest density, matter no longer radiates outward—it bends inward, into invisibility. Creation and destruction are revealed as phases of the same rhythm.
Closer to home, the same law governs the earth. Ecosystems thrive on balance through oscillation: predator and prey rise and fall in cycles, forests grow and burn and regrow, populations expand until their abundance provokes disease, famine, or migration. Growth and collapse, creation and destruction, are not failures of nature—they are nature’s pattern.
At the level of human society, the pattern sharpens into history. What we take to be triumphs, when carried too far, generate their opposites:
Industrialization → Environmental Crisis. Coal, steam, and oil freed societies from subsistence, powering factories, railroads, and cities. But the very abundance that drove progress also reshaped the planet—polluting air, warming climates, and pushing ecosystems toward collapse.
Empire → Decolonization. Nations built vast empires across continents, claiming power and resources. Yet domination inevitably sparked resistance, rebellions, and ultimately the collapse of those empires.
Sexual Liberation → Loneliness Epidemic. The sexual revolution promised freedom, intimacy, and self-expression. But taken to extremes, it sometimes fostered commodification, isolation, and a deeper sense of disconnection.
Liberalism → Control. Societies founded on tolerance can, paradoxically, enforce conformity in the name of protecting freedom itself. When freedom is defended rigidly, it can bend toward restriction.
Digital Connectivity → Digital Alienation. The internet promised connection, community, and shared knowledge. Yet today, it often drives polarization, misinformation, and a sense of isolation despite endless networks of “friends.”
Even in economics, the cycle is relentless. Credit pulls the future into the present, financing canals, railways, housing booms, Silicon Valley startups. Yet abundance inflated by debt flips to scarcity when reckoning comes: the crashes of 1837, 1929, 2000, 2008. Expansion collapses into contraction. Triumph turns into nemesis.
Is this merely human folly? No—it is physics, psychology, and metaphysics at once. In thermodynamics, entropy ensures order slides into disorder. In psychology, Jung observed that repressed forces return in distorted forms. In religion and philosophy, the pattern echoes: pride precedes downfall in the Bible; Buddhism prescribes the middle path; Taoism enshrines yin and yang, each containing the seed of its opposite.
Seen from this angle, enantiodromia is not a metaphor—it is as real as gravity. It explains why there is something rather than nothing. A perfect balance would cancel itself out, leaving no change, no movement, no reality. Perfect equilibrium is timeless—it has no before and after, no change to mark the passage of moments. Only oscillation gives us time. The swing between opposites is not just history’s rhythm; it is the engine of reality itself.
To recognize enantiodromia is to see reality’s hidden metronome: stars collapsing, ecosystems cycling, civilizations rising and falling, ideologies hardening into their opposites. It is not an error in the system—it is the system.
Can the Rhythm Be Broken?
If enantiodromia is as universal as gravity—governing stars, ecosystems, economies, and cultures—then the question is unavoidable: can awareness allow us to break free of it? Or at least escape its darker swings?
The honest answer is no. The rhythm cannot be broken. Enantiodromia is not a glitch in the system; it is the system. Like tides and seasons, societies swing between growth and reversal. To imagine otherwise is to cling to the illusion of linear progress—an illusion history has repeatedly refuted.
But while the cycle cannot be stopped, it can be navigated. Like sailors who cannot command the wind but can trim their sails, we cannot abolish reversal but we can learn to move with it. Awareness transforms the cycle from catastrophe into opportunity.
In practice, this means reading the signs of overextension—whether in credit markets, political ideologies, cultural movements, or personal lives—and adjusting before abundance tips into dependency, liberation into bondage, stability into rigidity. The task is not to abolish extremes but to move with them, to act with foresight rather than denial.
AI’s voracious appetite for energy, today’s towering debt, and cultural overreliance on digital connection are not signs of unbroken ascent. They are signs of an hourglass flipping. Creation is becoming consumption. Liberation is shading into dependence. Do you see it? To see this clearly is to prepare—not with fantasies of endless growth, but with strategies of balance, resilience, and adaptation.
History is not a staircase climbing toward utopia; it is a rhythm of rise and reversal. To live wisely is not to escape that rhythm, but to move with it. Progress may be an illusion, but wisdom lies in learning the swing—and in turning inevitability into insight.
And just as with the energy that powers AI and civilization itself, recognizing the cycles of creation and consumption allows us to navigate them intelligently, rather than be consumed by them. The shoulder injury ad, the AI conversation, the algorithms shaping our attention—these are the hourglass in miniature. Awareness is the first step to thriving within it. The way up and the way down, as Heraclitus reminds us, are one and the same.
This is why I write: to resist the scripts engineered for us, to name the reversals before they swallow us. Independent voices matter because they notice what the algorithm erases. If this essay helped you see more clearly, consider supporting the work—through Patreon, BuyMeACoffee, or Substack. Each contribution is not just support for me, but a small act of balance against the pull of engineered dependency.
You can add men into women on that list of reversal into opposites
Interesting take. With the increased consumption of energy by technology (AI, Crypto), what could be the ‘reversal’?? Won’t this overuse of available energy be limiting to other uses of the energy.