Walk away from a field for a year.
When you return, you will not find order. You will not find abundance. You will not find anything arranged in your favor by a universe that decided, in your absence, to build something on your behalf.
You will find weeds. Overgrowth. The slow, patient reclamation of the land by everything you didn't plant.
This is not a metaphor. This is reality.
The default state of all things is not prosperity. It is not health. It is not knowledge, or love, or strength, or peace. The default state of all things is decay.
The universe tends toward disorder. Toward the slow dissolution of whatever was built back into the raw, indifferent material it came from.
This is the philosophy of physics. And until you understand it as both, you will keep asking the question that guarantees you stay exactly where you are.
People ask, "What causes poverty?" Well, nothing. It is the original state—the default, the starting point. The real question is: What causes prosperity?
The Universe does not hand you a gift. It hands you raw material.
Stone. Soil. The human body. The capacity for language, for reason, for pattern recognition, for the accumulation of knowledge across a lifetime. That is the offer.
Stone does not become a house on its own. Soil does not arrange itself into a harvest. The body does not strengthen without resistance. The mind does not clarify without effort applied against its natural preference for familiar grooves.
Every good thing, every form of prosperity in every dimension of human life, is an anomaly.
It is something that should not exist, given the natural tendency of all things to unravel, and yet exists because a human being stood between the tendency and the outcome and refused to cooperate with it.
This is what prosperity actually is: A sustained, deliberate act of defiance against the direction the universe was already moving in. Not luck. An intervention.
The Stoics had no patience for the question: What caused this?
They believed that Stoicism is not the insistence that things would work out in the end, or that the universe was fundamentally ordered in favor of human flourishing. It is the daily, rigorous, sometimes exhausted work of a man asking himself what he was going to do today. What he was going to build. Where he had fallen short of who he intended to be and what he was going to do about it.
This is the difference between a philosophy of endurance and a philosophy of construction.
So to look at a lack of assets, a lack of discipline, or a lack of meaning and ask "who did this to me?" is an act of supreme naivety. Nobody did it to you. You are simply experiencing the raw gravity of the default state.
— Marcus | Stern Stoic