Homeostasis is, at once, a brutally simple and profoundly elusive phenomenon.

We immediately recognize it when we see it, but it's so ubiquitous, omnipresent, and in flux that picking out a single instance, within the confines of everyday thinking, requires enormous conscious effort.

It's like following a single bird in a chaotic flock, or never losing focus of that one blade whilst lying on your back staring at a ceiling fan.

And yet, at other times, you can't do anything but notice homeostasis. Or rather, the deviation from it.

So hangry not even a Snickers will help? Dripping with sweat at the beach on a hot summer day. A freak thunderstorm out of nowhere.

These are the obvious, beat-you-over-the-head examples.

But what about the subtler variations? Let's dial up the contrast to make that easier.

Enter snowballs in July.

Sometimes, if you live in a frozen-hellhole of a latitude, you get snow in July^[1]. But, that's still pretty rare. And in places that's not happening on the regular, say Florida, you need to be more deliberate about obtaining said frozen water sphere.

You could feasibly make one, using some combination of an artificially cold environment (like a giant walk-in freezer), a compressor, hoses, and some fancy aerosolizing fittings. You could also go somewhere with snow in July (a really tall mountain, or you know, the southern hemisphere) and bring it back, so long as you can keep it frozen in transit; a Yeti probably isn't going to cut it.

Either way, it's going to be expensive, time consuming, use a lot of energy, and be a real pain in the persqueeter.

Now, I'm sure this all sounds rather ridiculous. A snowball is a basically-pointless thing to have in July.

But the punchline is that in most aspects of life today, we're drowning in "snowballs in July."

Refrigerators, AC, cloud computing warehouses, supply chains generally, groceries, democracy^[2], personal productivity systems, our health, relationships, continuing education, and so much more.

All of these things require some level of constant and/or intermittent upkeep to sustain them whilst operating at some "distance" from baseline, i.e., homeostasis.

Homeostasis for the frozen pizza in your freezer is a soggy, miserable, outside-room-temperature. Only by pumping continuous electricity (with increasing amounts in hotter weather) does that puppy stay frozen, awaiting the next time you've got the late night munchies.

Relationships require constant personal growth from both parties, as well as sustained effort and vulnerability over the long-term.

Infrastructure requires maintenance, further research into more adaptive technologies, and regular, wholesale reconstruction.

You get the idea.

Now, to caveat: none of this is to paint an inherently gloomy picture. Having stuff that requires continuous work and energy to stave off the inevitable march of entropy isn't a blanket problem.

Fundamentally, it's a problem of priorities.

The point is not a sweeping rejection of cool people and things. That would be ridiculous.

No, it requires awareness and introspection, at the individual and collective levels, to sort out which things are worth maintaining despite the cost, and then bake those costs into overall, holistically-sustainable systems.

And whilst that project could be snarkily summarized as "society," that is the assignment, nonetheless.

Perhaps we should improve it somewhat.