Take a tank of gasoline. Concentrated, usable energy, sitting still. Burn it and the energy does its work, then spreads off as heat and exhaust — still in the world, in some bookkeeping sense, but no longer anything you could drive on. Gathered, spent, scattered.

Now take an idea. It starts compressed inside one head. It goes out, moves through people, turns into books and arguments and habits, gets richer and more tangled and harder to pin down the farther it travels. Gathered, spent, scattered.

The same curve. But don't take "the same" on my word — lay them on top of each other and watch the stages line up, one for one. Gathered: the fuel packed in the tank; the idea packed in one head. Spent: the fuel burned to push a piston; the idea argued out, taught, acted on. Scattered: exhaust you can't drive on; an idea so spread through books and habits and offhand remarks that you can't point to where it lives anymore. Three stages, run twice, and they match at every stage.

One of them is thermodynamics — fuel, heat, the laws from the back of a school textbook. The other has no thermodynamics in it anywhere. Just information, moving through minds. And it draws the line the gasoline drew, point for point.

That is the part that first stopped me. Not that fuel runs down; everyone knows fuel runs down. That an idea — made of nothing physical at all — runs down the same way.

That shape keeps its plain name here: gathered, spent, scattered. It's the same one that runs through everything after, where it gets a set of sharper names that stick — a funnel narrowing in, a bottleneck where one form survives, a fan-out spreading downstream. Same three moments, two sets of words. Worth holding onto.

Try it yourself

Find a third thing that runs the same curve — gathered, spent, scattered. A career, a forest fire, a savings account, a fad. Once you've found one of your own, you own the move.

So where else does that curve turn up?