I’ve been investigating various issues wrt motivation, pleasure, and reward. As you might imagine, these topics dovetail into each other and into a variety of other stuff, too. Which I guess is both the fun of it and why it’s so goddamn irritating.
But here’s a question: why is a messy office bothersome? Having papers scattered all over the place, piles of magazines, half-empty coffee cups — offices seem to have higher rates of entropy than the rest of the universe (that’s another question to investigate) and the end result is as unpleasant as it is ubiquitous. Conversely, clean, well-ordered spaces are aesthetically pleasant, even when no element within those spaces is pleasant. Why?