On Pouring Epoxy Over Happiness and Being Shocked by the Result

“Freeze, Moment, You’re Busted”

Picture a rare, peaceful evening: calm reigns in the kitchen, the cat is full, nobody is sniffling, and your kid is howling with laughter over something profoundly silly like a dropped spoon. Chores are done, nowhere to rush. The tired brain immediately flips an internal switch: “Dear universe, let it stay like this forever!”

A completely understandable thought, but apply a little logic, and the wish turns downright creepy. For that snapshot to stay pristine, you’d have to forbid the child from growing up, prevent your loved ones from shifting their outlooks, stop your job from ever throwing new challenges at you, and halt your own evolution (otherwise, yesterday’s menu will bore you to tears tomorrow). We naively plead to preserve a wonderful moment, but what we are actually asking for is to pin everyone who keeps it alive to the wall with thumbtacks.

A Thought Experiment: Eternal Managers and Monopolies on Air

Let’s imagine a purely hypothetical scenario: biological immortality has just been invented. Zero wrinkles, zero aging, zero expiration dates.

It sounds like an anthem to self-actualization: study languages across centuries, save the planet, pen epic memoirs. But there is a catch. Along with the benevolent researcher, the guy who owns the sole water tap also becomes immortal. Along with you, so does the department manager who genuinely believes the entire enterprise will burn to ashes the second he steps aside. Five hundred years go by. New generations are born, but the swivel chairs never change hands. The incumbents have accumulated impenetrable networks, vast resources, and a titanium conviction: “I built this sandbox from scratch, I know best, and who on earth are you anyway?”

This isn’t cartoonish villainy; it’s garden-variety egocentrism mistaking everyone else’s future for a mere sequel to its own autobiography. Of course, an eternal monopoly is not inevitable: institutions, legal frameworks, and voluntary handovers of authority can limit power. Nor does mortality itself guarantee fairness (inherited wealth sends its regards).

Yet the analogy lands squarely. An empirical study by economists Azoulay, Fons-Rosen, and Graff Zivin (2019) showed that following the sudden death of star life scientists, publications by their former collaborators dropped, while contributions from researchers outside that inner circle grew, often bringing distinct ideas. That reflects dynamics within specific academic fields, not a universal law of human progress, and it is certainly no excuse to wish death upon anyone. The takeaway is far more practical: make room for successors while you’re still around, voluntarily sharing the microphone.

Physics, Biology, and the Cult of the Endless Battery

Personal productivity gurus adore their pet cliché: “Stasis equals death!” Physics looks at this statement with deep confusion. A boulder or a crystal sitting in mechanical equilibrium is a perfectly stable physical system; it simply doesn’t need to sip an oat milk latte or generate quarterly deliverables to exist.

Where physics does help is in contrasting a rock with a flame. A candle’s flame looks like a stable object, but it exists only as long as fuel and oxygen flow in, the reaction occurs, and combustion products dissipate. You cannot save the flame by forbidding it to burn the candle. A whirlpool holds its form precisely because water rushes continuously through it. Ilya Prigogine explored this in thermodynamics via dissipative structures, whose order is maintained by flows of energy and matter (Nobel Lecture, 1977). Mapping this onto human identity is a metaphor rather than a mathematical proof, but it is an illuminating one.

Biology tells a similar tale: homeostasis maintains our core body temperature not through stone-cold stillness, but through the nonstop internal hustle of blood vessels and biochemistry (OpenStax, “Homeostasis”). Meanwhile, the cellular autophagy pathways for which Yoshinori Ohsumi received the Nobel Prize (Biographical summary) are dedicated to dismantling and recycling the cell’s own waste. Everyday life operates along comparable lines: a behavioral habit that once shielded you (like adopting a grim, stony silence) can end up sabotaging your ability to communicate with those you love in a different setting.

However, autophagy is not magical rejuvenation, and population-level evolution is not an inevitable march toward abstract perfection (Misconceptions about evolution, UC Berkeley). Seeds of certain plant species can preserve their viability in a state of suspended growth, a property harnessed under appropriate storage conditions in seed vaults (Seeds for life, Kew). Lying down on the sofa, exhaling, and staying quiet for a while isn’t a “backward slide”; it’s a normal, valid pause that is sometimes necessary for recovery.

The Illusion of the “Finished Me” and Forecasting Traps

We cling desperately to the familiar. In Samuelson and Zeckhauser’s classic experiments, participants consistently stuck with the status quo simply because it was the preselected default (Samuelson & Zeckhauser, 1988). That doesn’t mean caution is inherently foolish, but it pays to ask yourself: “Am I clinging to this specific job title, or to my baseline need for security and dignity?”

Worse still, we tend to believe our current personality represents the universe’s final gold master release. Research on the “end of history illusion” (the sample identified a broad trend, even if it may not apply universally to every individual on Earth) revealed that people readily acknowledge how naive they were a decade ago, yet sincerely assume their tastes and values are now set in concrete (Quoidbach, Gilbert, & Wilson, 2013).

Yet the adult brain can physically reorganize—studies tracking adults learning to juggle observed temporary structural shifts on MRI scans (Draganski et al., 2004). This doesn't suggest we can sculpt ourselves into limitless superhumans at will, but it demonstrates genuine neuroplasticity.

Our track record at predicting our own emotional future, on the other hand, is abysmal. Research into affective forecasting shows we routinely overestimate the intensity and duration of future emotional reactions (Wilson & Gilbert, 2003). Losses are deeply real, and grief can reverberate for years. But the panicked cry of “if this project is scrapped, my life is ruined forever” is the forecast of a frightened mind, not an established fact. By the same token, hedonic adaptation doesn’t guarantee an eternal baseline of bliss: initial euphoria may fade, yet adaptation can remain incomplete, and meaningful events can shape our well-being over extended periods (Lucas, 2007).

Psychological flexibility is not about becoming a mindless weather vane; it encompasses simple, grounded persistence (Kashdan & Rottenberg, 2010). Sometimes you need to pivot tactics, and sometimes you need to endure a rough patch. A core value can outlive the specific vehicle you originally used to express it.

Sages, Esoterics, and Ocean Physics

Wisdom traditions exploring the fluid nature of reality go back millennia, though lumping them into a single homogenized soup does them a disservice:

• Buddhism (Dhammapada, verse 277) points to the impermanence of all conditioned phenomena in service of release from suffering and clinging—not as an excuse for reckless, hedonic distraction (Thanissaro Bhikkhu translation).

• Daoism (Dao De Jing, chapter 76) contrasts the supple softness of the living with the brittle stiffness of the dead—an evocative poetic ethic of flexibility, not an empirical biological passport (James Legge translation).

• Epictetus (Enchiridion, § 1) draws a rigorous line between what is up to us and what is outside our control (Elizabeth Carter translation). You own your effort, but you do not own a lifetime guarantee of audience applause.

• The occult treatise The Kybalion (1908), with its pendulums and tides (Chapter XI), is twentieth-century esotericism rather than physical law: the cosmos is under no obligation to dock you an exact ration of sorrow for every slice of cake you enjoy. Still, as a metaphor for cadence, it holds value: a dip in mood does not signal the collapse of your selfhood.

Bringing it all home is the metaphor of the ocean wave. A wave at its crest might fancy itself the star of the show and frantically struggle to maintain peak altitude. Yet from the standpoint of fluid dynamics, an ocean wave is an energy transfer moving through a medium, not a distinct, immutable chunk of water racing toward the shore on its own (NOAA Ocean Exploration). Plum Village monastics meditate on the wave remembering its water nature (Plum Village), but this is a contemplative, spiritual perspective, not scientific evidence for consciousness surviving bodily death. In everyday terms, the insight is simple: losing a title or status stings, but it doesn't erase you as a person.

No Fanaticism Required: Back to the Dinner Table

Fear and grief aren’t cured by chanting “just let go” or reciting Stoic soundbites. Change is expensive: it drains energy, burns through money, and frays nerves. Nobody is obligated to drop everything and march barefoot toward the horizon. Where choice exists, it is only reasonable to calibrate your pace, lean on existing supports, honor concrete commitments, and keep an exit ramp handy. When an involuntary shift hits, you may simply need space to grieve and regain your footing first.

If you happen to feel comfortable right where you are, stay put and cherish it. Just don’t try to encase the living people around you in resin. Instead of staging grand personal revolutions, consider a tiny, reversible step:

• Hand over a sliver of authority at work.

• Acknowledge honestly that an older child is entitled to their own tastes and mistakes.

• Have a calm conversation about family routines that may have outlived their usefulness.

That cozy kitchen scene will inevitably come to an end. The spoon will be washed, the kid will grow up, and the inside joke will fade from memory. The next happy moment will look entirely different, and you can’t get its script approved in advance anyway. A wave cannot know what lies ahead; it exists only because the sea never chose to freeze solid on the previous one.