Everywhere you look there are people underachieving, living dreary lives, or just not living the life they want to live. So why aren’t they? In the age we live in, there should be no excuse.  There is one example after another of someone whose life has quickly gone from crappiest to happiest. Here are the 4 reasons why people aren’t getting the good stuff.  

1. They don’t really want them
Ask people what they want in life and they tell you all kinds of standard things: a cool job, lots of money, good friends, plenty of free time, and good relationships. Dig a little deeper and you might find they don’t really want the things they say they want. Money often means hard work and hassles. Good relationships require intimacy which itself require a whole lot of honesty and openness - something many people subconsciously or consciously avoid. A cool job will require initiative, potential insecurity and maybe even a lackluster salary. It’s the same in all cases - one part of you wants something but another part knows of a possible downside and keeps you from going after it.

2. They don’t know/believe they exist
You can’t do or have something if you don’t know it exists. A happy family life? Indeed many of us have been sold the notion that all families fight and all kids hate their parents. ‘Tis not so. Happy families do exist but unless you know this, you will never set out to get it. Recently, I’ve had to get up early for work and there’s a little voice inside me that says I should be tired. If my body doesn’t feel tired, then there is a dissonance - one part saying I should feel tired and another part saying I feel pretty good. Eventually the first part tells the second part to shut up. It thinks waking up at 5:30 and feeling good isn’t possible. It’s only when I present it to myself as a possibility that I can actually feel good that early. A good part of the wellness movement must be geared to educating the public of the existence of these “products”. We are confronted more and more with evidence that every human experience can be reproduced and we are not limited in taking some person’s good reality and making it our own. The first step in getting something is dropping the idea that something is impossible for you. “Easier said than done”, you say? Drop the idea that it’s easier said than done… It really is just like a light switch but you first have to drop the idea that it’s impossible that changing your life is easy. Get it?

3. They don’t believe they can/should have them
I saw an interview with Tom Cruise once (ok, it was on Oprah) where he said he used to believe that the life he lives was for “other people” and it was the point that he changed that belief at allowed him to actually live it himself. Many people feel subconsciously unworthy of having good things in life and surrender to not even trying to get them. Lots of money, a good job, a partner who treats them well - you see on a constant basis people all around settling for the things they subconsciously think they deserve. Belief systems are all-powerful. Everyone beliefs something different and you see that all combinations are possible and that all belief systems lead to their eventual reality - so feel free to choose the one you want - not the one you think belongs to you.

4. They don’t know how to get them
And just sometimes you might find all the other three points are ready and waiting but you just don’t know how to get them - how to break the patterns that dictate your behaviors or how to find and approach the mate you want or how to get the job that’s perfect for you. And that’s what human technology (psychology, self-help, personal development, GTD, etc) is all about.

Now what?
What’s so great about the age we live in is that there is a whole army of experts who dedicate their lives to these 4 points. If people don’t know about this army and what they do, they’ll never look for it. But they do exist and they can work wonders. Try and think of these 4 points in relation to your life and what’s holding you back from getting more of the good stuff. Don’t feel like thinking about it? Maybe you think it won’t lead anywhere? That’s kind of my point.

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Often pain and frustration are the womb of progress. Since pain and frustration are undesired states, it is natural that men will push to leave them. “It is always darkest before the dawn” they say. This is just that people cannot stand the “darkness” and so are inspired to invent light. Notice in history that so much good was preceded by so much bad. Personally, Quanology comes out of the frustration not having a proper definition of a life science - not that that’s so horrible…

“How should we live our lives?” “Where is the manual for this car?” There seem to be many sciences which explain so many facets of the universe and humanity but none which attempt to study how humans should best live on this planet. Many people would argue that there is no one way to live well, and they would be right. But what I hope to do is to shed light on why things are the way they are in hopes that people become more conscious of what they are actually doing and are better able to feel and decide what they want for themselves. Quanology is not here to tell people how they should live, but rather to increase their self-awareness and consciousness so that they can make better decisions themselves, and have a better understanding on how to take action once they decide.

Obviously the truth requires in depth investigation and the natural result of this is a series of specializations - all sort of next to each other with an occasional overlap between two and an occasional gap of unanswered questions between two. Quanology strives to unite all the specializations through a primarily high-level overview with the necessary references to the specialists who give the necessay substance to it all.

Psychology largely studies the human mind with little after-thought to how it is happiest and how to achieve such a state**. Philosophy does not… Self-help comes close but is continuously avoids scientific backings and lacks a underlying base. Religion attempts to but fails. Why? Because any science which attempts to look at how people should live must be treated as a technology. And technology is always changing and developing. Religion, by its traditional definition, does not change. Buddhism, for me, comes very close to a proper definition of how people should live, but slightly escapes this short-coming by its often vague and ambiguous conclusions. It too, though, is in need of some tweaking. Quanology is meant to unite various disciplines of science and direct them at a healthy human experience. I’ll be arrogant enough to call it a unified theory. So, let’s start at the very beginning.

A very good place to start
Science is layered. Every truth has a truth just below it which it must be based on. So, we go back now to the very first truth we (think we) know and we’ll build from there. Quanology assumes that The Universe was born with The Big Bang. Matter concentrated into a very small space and exploded. It has since been expanding - riding on the initial release of that explosion. The Universe is expanding and everything in it is expanding. Ultimately, this trend underscores every aspect of life. Once you understand it, you’ll see it everywhere.

Expanding and fitting
The details of this expansion are pretty interesting. If you drop a cup of water on the floor, you’ll witness an impact on the floor and the water shooting out in all directions. If the process of the water shooting out could be slowed down, you’d see an uneven dispertion of that water. Some side will have higher pressure and shoot farther and some will have lower pressure and remain closer to the initial point of impact. So, what you’ll get will not be a perfect circle around the point of impact, you’ll get a very uneven pattern. Whatever you get, you can conclude that the splashed water fit perfectly with its environment. Drop another cup of water and it too will fit perfectly with its environment. The same can be said for everything in The Universe - it is expanding and fitting in with its environment. This is the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

Entropy
The definition most of us got in high school is “entropy is the amount of disorder in a system” and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy in a system is always increasing. The definition of entropy has since been clarified*. Entropy is now defined by scientists as the “dispersion of energy”. Seems to fit better with The Big Bang and the water falling on the floor. The Big Bang is the beginning of The Universe’s energy dispersal. Everything in The Universe is involved in energy dispersal or dissipation.

Evolution - Entropy for Living Things
If entropy is defined as increasing disorder, then Evolution presents a quandary. “Why is there this pocket of organization if the world is supposed to be increasing in disorder?” But when we see entropy as the trend to dissipate energy, then evolution fits in as simply “a great way to dissipate energy”. And indeed it is. Humans consider themselves highly evolved, and in this context we are: we contribute to the dissipation of more energy than any other species. Evolution is just a system for self-organizing beings to fit into their environment. To wrap your head around it, it’s best to look at it from a macro level. If the population of mosquitoes in a swamp seems to be getting quicker, then the frogs in the area will also get quicker in trying to catch them. The frogs are just fitting into their environment - much like the cup of water fit into its environment. The water did it by simply moving from a high-pressure environment to a low-pressure environment. The frogs do it by a similar mechanism, but much more complex. The low pressure in the environment when the water hit the ground, was the area around it - relative to the high pressure area which was where the water hit the ground. Low pressure areas can simply be seen as “areas of opportunity for energy dissipation”. Energy can be dissipated into areas of low energy. And that’s what’s going on in The Universe. With the mosquitoes and the frogs, the environment shifted. There was relatively high pressure when the mosquitoes were a certain speed and then it became low-pressure when they got quicker. So, the frogs evolve in the direction of the “area of opportunity for energy dissipation”. It’s a universal trend. It is the same when water hits the ground, when investors put money into interesting stocks, when they pull money out of uninteresting stocks, when men flock to pretty young women, when a tennis player wacks a “short ball” to finish off a point, when The Beatles are allowed to achieve God-like status in the world by the rise of media technology, when inventors devise the remote control for the people sick of having to get up to change the tv, when the food industry shifts from high calorie foods to health foods as the population gets exccesively obese…etc etc.

Evolution and you
Using evolution as the basis for life allows us to better understand ourselves and our motivations. Religion has tried to do this for some time now but its conclusions have never really been based on anything tangible or empirical. And you get the inconsistencies, the hypocrisies and the legions of dissatisfied members who demand a life manual with more footnotes. We love the spirituality but hate the gaps in logic. So, evolution can do all this for you. We can finally understand ourselves and our motivations by putting them in the evolutionary context. Understanding evolution then becomes the first step to understanding ourselves - and evolution is often misunderstood. Please have a look at Intro to Evolution for more details.

Quanology makes the simple assumption that we are happiest doing what is natural. And thereby spends lots of time and energy trying to find out what is natural for us - ie, what Nature wants for us. In the context of evolution and entropy, we conclude that Nature wants us to dissipate energy and to do it well. If we can see the parallels in our lives between what we do and how much energy we dissipate, we should find the keys to happiness and fulfillment. Depressed? Depression, in the context of Quanology, is not dissipating energy. It feels bad. Mania is when you dissipate lots of energy. It feels good. Get it? And that will be the goal of Quanology: providing the world with a blueprint for a happy life.

The Players
The world is a system and Quanology is attempting to thoroughly describe the system and your role in it. The following elements of the system or “players” have already been identified on a high level and will be further explored in the Quanological Journey.

Entropy- The Queen Bee. It is the top level element of the system. All other elements are simply a derivative of this one.

Evolution - The mechanism for energy dissipation of all living things. Of course, there are different kinds of evolution. Biological for individual members of a species, Cultural for groups of individuals. Read more on cultural evolution here.

Technology - Technology is simply evolution in pieces. If evolution is how things develop on a larger scale, then technology is just pockets of development. The TV industry evolves, but LCDs are one of the technologies. Everything that “does” or “happens” is a technology.

Energy - The currency of the system. It is what everything is composed of. Remember the Theory of Relativity? It’s really saying that mass and energy are interchangeable.

Dissipation - The universal trend to have energy move from places of high concentration to places of low concentration.

Decentralization - Decentralization is, of course, just dispersing energy. But more often we use it when describing the trend in systems to remove power or control from a single point and delegate these elements to the subordinate parts. Decentralized systems tend to work better (ie, disperse energy better) on the whole than those in which power and control are kept bottled up and hoarded.

Integration- Another corollary to entropy. Is The Universe expanding? Or is it just integrating with its surroundings? Integration is basically dissipation, so we see that everything in the world is eventually involved in integrating. Look all around these days in world affairs and business and you’ll see integration. Look at The European Union. Someone even pointed out to me how much more passing and teamwork there is in soccer these days as opposed to 30 years ago. The players are not islands, they are an integrated team…

GPS - Genetic Proliferation Strategy - Since the goal of Biological Evolution is genetic proliferation, this term describes a person’s individual choice of strategy for genetic proliferation. To put it in layman’s terms - it’s your personality, as defined from the perspective of evolution. Read more on Genetic Proliferation Strategies here.

Systems - Everything is a system and all systems have similar characteristics and goals. The Universe is a system, humanity is a system, your government is a system, and you are a system. You all have a lot in common.

Resources - All the things you have at your disposal to help you accomplish your goal genetic proliferation. These include things like physical health, wealth, social and family networks, psychological assets, skills, knowledge, environmental assets, and talents.

It’s all about “Happy”
The only reason to delve into all this is to make you happy. That’s the drive behind everything that humans do. “I thought you just said it was to dissipate energy.” Ah, sharp. It is to dissipate energy, but dissipating energy makes us happy and we dissipate the most energy when we are happy. It’s a beautiful circle. And the big quest for Quanology is really to define what happiness is for humans. I’ve already taken a stab at it here in the 7 Keys to Happiness article. Happiness is only slightly different for everyone. For the most part, true happiness is a static thing - though not necessarily somewhere we can ever perfectly reach. Why not? Because of our natural drive to expand. “Happiness” as a target will always be moving away from you. The most you can do is to do your best in life and be content in knowing that you will always have a small spot of desire and restlessness inside you. And that’s part of life as we define it.

I might be wrong
Of course, I’m just putting this all together from concepts I’ve learned and stolen from others. Information here may be incorrect and/or incomplete. But all is open for discussion, critique and correction. The system itself is probably immutable but our understanding of it will develop over the course of time. And so will our precision and skill in explaning it. Perfection is the journey, but I’m just getting started, so a few sore feet are to be expected.

So, that’s Quanology in a nutshell. Hope this site does this concept justice and provides sufficient explanation to every little aspect of the world, and more importantly, can teach you something about yourself and how to be happy.

*The definition of Entropy was already updated in the 60’s, so we probably just had some outdated text books. This is another theme of Quanology - how fast technology changes and the delay we experience in incorporating new technology.

** Positive Psychology is actually beginning to ask and answer such questions as “how cn we live best” and backing it up well with scientific research. Quanology incorporates many of their findings in both its theory and application.

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