For example:
- Used napkins and cups appear in the planter near our entrance. The Nandina domestica, already struggling, has not been consulted.
- Cigarette butts sprouted in a planter within reach of a café table. The Aspidistra elatior growing there slightly indignant at the situation.
- The large vases in the courtyard. We bought them. We planted them. While we were gone, they were rearranged into new, more expressive configurations. We found them and quietly put them back where they belonged.
- The patch of garden near the trash area has acquired objects we cannot trace: balls, shards of glass, bits of plastic. We don’t know their origin story.
- Advertising mail piles up in the shared mailbox, in the slot everyone agrees does not belong to anyone in particular. We clean it out.
Rather than asking whether some cultures generate more entropy than others, it may be more useful to ask how responsibility for dealing with it is distributed.
We keep coming back to two patterns.
In the first, responsibility is assigned explicitly. Someone is in charge. Someone is paid. Someone will handle it. Until then, things wait.
In many Italian contexts, responsibility is clearly defined but narrowly bounded. If it’s your role, you do it thoroughly. If it’s not, intervening can feel inappropriate, even slightly rude. The logic isn’t indifference so much as it isn’t my role. From that perspective, entropy accumulates in the gaps between roles.
In the second pattern, responsibility is shared. No one is explicitly assigned, but everyone feels a low-level obligation to intervene.
Japan is often cited as the clearest example. Responsibility there is diffuse but internalized. The question isn’t “Is this my job?” so much as “How will this reflect on the group?” Public trash cans can be scarce, yet streets are clean. People clean schools, offices, and even public spaces they don’t own. Disorder is pushed back early, in countless small gestures, before it has time to settle.
Living here in Italy, we operate as if responsibility is ambient, in a place where responsibility is largely explicit. That mismatch may explain why we notice entropy so acutely. It’s just a hypothesis, but one we keep returning to.
We also catch ourselves wondering if geography plays a role. The farther north you go, the more things seem labeled, assigned, and maintained. But even as we think it, we don’t quite trust the idea.
Ivy and Language
We’ve written before about ivy in Italy, how it climbs and wraps itself around trees without anyone seeming particularly bothered. To our eyes, it looks like a problem waiting to be addressed. To others, it reads as part of the scenery, even something cozy. Like a scarf.
We’ve started to wonder if entropy works the same way. What we read as neglect, others read as life happening. Not because they don’t see it, but because intervening isn’t always the default response. Stepping in can feel like overstepping your role.
In that sense, entropy isn’t always decay. Sometimes it’s restraint. A decision, conscious or not, to let things be.
As we’ve written about elsewhere, the Italian language makes good use of the impersonal: si fa, si vede, è così. Things get done. Things get seen. Things simply are. No one in particular needs to step forward. Entropy fits comfortably into that kind of grammar.
Against Entropy, Briefly
We still pick up the glass. We still reset the plants. We still clear the mailbox. Not because we think we are winning, but because these small acts feel like a way of staying in conversation with a place, our home, our community.
Entropy always wins in the long run. But in the short run, noticing still feels like a choice. And for now, it’s one we keep making.