Chaos

Chaos. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about this word, obsessing over it really. It seems to be everywhere: in global events, political issues, jobs, exchanges, and conversations that all feel like they’ve been randomly nailed to a dartboard. There might be some themes or connections behind certain expressions, but overall, it just feels like a mess.

And you know what? Chaos is what we live in.

We live in a constantly changing world of shifting opinions, apologies, anger, war, and peace. We face ongoing tensions over tariffs and political unrest. The Cold War is being fought again, both politically and economically, creating ripple effects that influence every part of our lives.

The Musical Metaphor of My Inner Landscape

This feeling became deeply personal during my recent travels and the amount of driving I’ve had to do. I have this habit of putting one of my playlists on my phone, hitting shuffle, and letting the music guide the time. Through this simple ritual, I’ve realized something profound about myself: I am inherently chaotic.

My taste jumps from metalcore to classical, from bluegrass to folk, to genres I can’t even name. I find a melody, a bass line, a chorus, or a hook, and those little pieces become the reason a song gets added. The fragments become the determining factor for adding tracks to my collection. In a cheeky sort of way, the playlist becomes chaos that represents what is raging in my mind and, even more so, what’s happening around the world.

It’s like I’m curating my own personal chaos engine, one shuffled song at a time.

The Cosmic Hierarchy of Disorder

As humans, we seem to exist within chaos, and we’ve even differentiated it into levels of severity, creating this cosmic hierarchy of disorder:

Celestial Chaos encompasses the explosion of stars, the expressed gravity of black holes sucking light from the cosmic sky, phenomena so vast they’re almost abstract to us, forces that dwarf our earthly concerns.

Milky Way Chaos manifests in the more benign streaks of stars, comets, and other celestial permutations that give us pause for thought but don’t cause us any real problems in our daily lives.

Earth’s Chaos surrounds us with geopolitical turmoil; certain Western dictators and Eastern juntas or tribunals are creating ripple effects across continents, shaping the very fabric of international relations.

Economic Chaos plays out weekly in this relentless cycle: a new tariff launched one week, retracted the next, as sabers are rattled in their scabbards and various discontents are made public. The markets convulse, currencies fluctuate, and entire economies pivot on the whims of distant decisions.

Community Chaos inflicts the tension of Democrat versus Republican, political party versus political party, the undercurrent of blame, and disproportionate effects felt by people who just want to live their own damn lives without anyone trying to kill them for being who they are.

Personal Chaos includes our emotional and physical turmoil; all these pieces coming together into a chaotic mix of... I don’t even know what to call it, but it’s humanity’s mean estate.

The Weight of Existence in Beautiful Disorder

All these bits of chaos combine into a heady mix that leaves us grappling with fundamental questions. Somehow, through it all, we have to determine whether we’re worth a damn. We have to decide whether this chaos is worth living in, around, and through. We must determine, to a certain extent, whether there’s hope at the end of this whole festering clump of shit.

But what if we’re looking at it the wrong way?

Here’s what I’ve come to understand: Chaos is a driver. It is the tension that exists in the moments when we don’t have a plan or an understanding of what could be or what was. Chaos is an inflection moment, a point in time where we have the opportunity to decide for ourselves, rather than have someone or something decide for us, what we’re going to be when we grow up.

It doesn’t matter if you’re ten years old or ten thousand. It doesn’t matter if you’re a neutron star on the verge of collapse or a star just being born. In the grand scheme of things, there is a chosen path, a chosen point of inflection, a point of demarcation available to each of us.

The Beauty in the Breakdown

I want to argue that chaos is beautiful in its own way. It’s no different from the individual dots or expressions on a Pollock painting. It’s no different from the jarring, pixelated colors in a photograph; the hot pixels, the cold pictures, the moments that exist in the beyond of it all.

I’d argue that chaos is something we should lean more into rather than run away from. In all of that, I argue that chaos is not something we should be afraid of.

The question isn’t whether we can avoid chaos; we can’t. The question is whether we can find meaning, beauty, and opportunity within it. Whether we can let it guide us, like a shuffled playlist on a long drive, toward something we never expected but somehow always needed.

The Resolution Always Comes

Here’s the truth that sustains me: Chaos always has its resolution. It may not be in the ways, means, or moments that we want, but chaos has something for each of us. It offers us the gift of choice in the midst of uncertainty, the opportunity to define ourselves when everything else seems undefined.

So the next time you feel overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder surrounding us, remember this: you’re not broken for feeling chaotic. You’re not failing for existing in the tension. You’re simply human, navigating the same cosmic playlist we’re all shuffling through, one unpredictable song at a time.

The chaos isn’t the enemy, it’s the canvas. What you choose to paint on it is entirely up to you. We are all chaos machines in our own right, processing infinite inputs and somehow creating meaning from the magnificent mess.

Embrace the shuffle. Dance with the disorder. Let the chaos engine run.

Because in the end, that’s where the real magic happens, in the spaces between the notes, in the tension between order and disorder, in the beautiful uncertainty of not knowing what song comes next.

May it ever be so.
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Author's note: This post was written for Cong 2025, an unconference held every year in Cong, Ireland.