One of my childhood memories was finding a piece of yellow plastic broken off of some toy that had lots of colorful little symbols and ornaments printed on it.

One of my childhood memories was finding a piece of yellow plastic broken off of some toy that had lots of colorful little symbols and ornaments printed on it. It lay buried in grass for a few years at that point and it went almost white, bleached by the sun. I stood a while, pondered and remembered the toy as I had remembered it further in the past. Fast forward to my late 20s. I started, not too systematically, learning quantum mechanics because I always felt that, although regarded as an intimidating topic, it is probably a thing that is, given a bit of time, not too complicated to understand and involves just as much forgetting established ideas as it involves understanding new ones. And THAT I have on lock down, you hand me ideas no matter how complicated and I will forget the shit out of them so hard it's gonna make your head spin, tremendous. So when learning about entropy and information conservation it struck me: Every time a photon tickled my child self and told me about the way atoms of my toy were arranged, black ones here, yellow ones there, my god even some god damned green ones, that information was not handed to me for free. It was taken from my toy and not only when I saw it but for as long as it lay there enjoying the sun, it sent its information out to everyone passing by, even back into the sky, while putting on its new dress which was designed with a die and tailored by nuclear fusion. Some of it will have waved pluto good bye before the real journey began. Year in, year out. And, finally, it showed. Patterns grew less strong. Distinctions between different regions of the plastic died off. And the information from all the times I saw my toy was, as exclusively as anything, mine. Noone else ever laid hands on these particular bits. They are with me, still, because they tipped a few neurons of mine into a state stable enough to last a few decades. They are slowly leaking, for instance into your brain right now, but I am sure I will not run out until I turn senile. TL;DR quantum mechanics made me realise that all my toys were doomed but that I managed to secure some of their essence