When you gaze up at the night sky and see constellations like Ursa Major, Orion, or the Big Dipper, have you ever realized that they don’t actually exist?
These constellations are not patterns written into the cosmos. They are shapes we humans imposed on a vast, chaotic sky. The universe didn’t name the stars, we did. We invented stories, grouped stars into figures, and divided the night into constellations.
Now glance at your phone. It shows the date, the time, the day of the week, even the time zone, accurate down to the second. But time itself has no tick marks. It simply flows. We’re the ones who sliced it into seconds with clocks, who marked it with calendars. We created order within time, by carving structure out of its endless motion.
From the moment civilization began, we’ve been doing one thing again and again: Finding order in chaos.
We invented language and writing to make sense of the world. We built mathematics and physics to explain the world with reason. We set standards to measure time, length, and speed. We even created religions, economies, and laws to stabilize our societies.
But what exactly is chaos? And why do we fear it so much?
Why Are We So Afraid of Chaos?
Chaos means Unpredictability. Lack of control. Uncertainty.
And these are the very things that humans are instinctively wired to fear.
Even in ancient times, we tried to name our fears: Thunder was a god’s anger. Disease was a witch’s curse. Death was a call from the underworld. These explanations may have been inaccurate, but they gave us something vital: psychological order. Even a myth feels better than meaningless chaos.
Humans are creatures of meaning. We live in narratives, in structure, in logic. When those collapse, we feel lost—floating in a sea of confusion.
Before Copernicus said the sun is at the center of the solar system, we believed that humans were the center of the universe, that all things revolved around us. This worldview gave our existence purpose, grounded in divine structure. But the heliocentric theory didn’t just replace one astronomical model with another, it smashed the old order. It whispered: “Earth is just one of many planets. Humanity is not special.”
And then came the questions: What about God? What about Heaven? What about the meaning of life? The collapse of meaning systems triggers existential fears. We create meaning in the world because we fear a world that has no structure, no explanation.
Chaos disorients us. But order helps us feel grounded, and gives us a sense of direction.
How Do We Fight Chaos?
We’re not good at living with chaos, but we’re very good at building order. That’s why we created things like language, math, laws, economies, standards, units, maps, classification systems, and more.
Yet nearly none of these forms of order are natural. They were built by humans. Brick by brick, we build our psychological defense to keep out the chaos.
We invented language to make the world speakable
Language is one of the first systems of order. Imagine a world without words. You couldn’t even distinguish “me” from “you,” let alone say “here” or “there.”
We created words to break the world into speakable chunks: mountain, ocean, forest, time, joy, belief, love, freedom... Each word is a label that compresses the chaos of reality. Then we invented writing, to spread that order, preserve it, and build upon it.
Language is the most primitive yet profound classification system. They shape how we describe the world and how we understand it.
We built systems so we could trust each other
An individual can survive by instinct. But a society needs rules.
From tribal customs and totems to modern contracts and constitutions, human society runs not on instinct but on shared systems. These aren’t designed to restrict individuals, they’re built so we can trust and cooperate.
If language answers the question “How can I talk to you?”, then systems answer “How can I trust that you’ll do what you said?”
That’s also why humans are one of the few species capable of complex social structures. Not because we’re smarter, but because we’re better at building shared order. That’s the foundation of civilization.
We defined standards to enable measurement and coordination
Where did the “meter” come from? Who decided the length of a “second”?
These are all human-defined. Standards give us consistent reference points, allowing the world to function in sync.
Thanks to standards, scientists can share data, workers can assemble parts, companies can trade internationally, and people around the world can follow the same schedule. Without standardization, modern society would dissolve into chaos.
We assign units to length, define scales for weight, encode formats for information. Even your ability to read this article depends on standardized character encoding, transmission protocols, and time synchronization between servers.
Standards are our way of turning a messy world into something understandable and cooperative.
We created language not just to talk, but to categorize and build consensus. We created systems not just to enforce rules, but to foster trust. We defined measures not just for precision, but to understand, repeat, and collaborate.
And as we advanced, we embedded this order into our tools: Math became a way to describe the world. Software became a way to follow rules automatically. Protocols, standards, taxonomies—they may seem boring, but they are part of humanity’s grand project of fighting chaos.
We may never defeat chaos. But we can name it, compress it, structure it and make it run within the bounds of order.
Order Is How We Talk to the World
Order is not something the world hands us. It’s something we create—a framework we impose to explain what we see.
Perhaps it’s because the world is so chaotic that we’re so obsessed with constructing order. We understand nature with concepts, organize society with rules, and handle complexity with technology. We observe, we name, we classify, we regulate—until order seeps into the tiniest corners of daily life.
In architectural drawings, we build symbolic systems with just lines: different line thicknesses for different wall types, different colors for different pipes or cables.
Later on in BIM environments, we’ve moved beyond "all just lines". Because we created newer, more refined orders: modeling conventions, naming rules, file structures, data standards.
Even in the unnoticed corners of life, order prevails: Books on library shelves are precisely categorized, labeled, and aligned. Supermarket goods are grouped by function and sorted by type. And your computer folders follow your personal sense of structure.
These are our efforts and evidences to fight against chaos, and also our way of communicating with the world.
In the end, maybe we spend our entire lives fighting chaos and chasing order.
But luckly, civilization is too.