Martin Heidegger and the Paradox of Help

The Syntropy of Leaping Ahead

As I’ve written about a lot, closed systems naturally drift toward entropy, which is a state of disorder, sameness, and energy loss. Life, on the other hand, is syntropic. It actively fights that drift by building complexity, organisation, and agency. When we think about human relationships, we usually assume that “helping” someone is automatically a syntropic act that adds energy to their life.

But Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who’s one of my favourite philosophers to unpack for people, saw a darker side to help. In his beast of a book, Being and Time (1927), he digs into what it means to be an authentic human facing mortality and the gravitational pull of “average everydayness” and the crowd (what he called “The They”).¹

Along the way, he drops a lesser-known insight: certain forms of help can actually hollow out the existence of the person being helped. Instead of building them up, this kind of help acts as a force of entropy, degrading their agency.

Heidegger splits how we care for others into two modes: “Leaping-In” and “Leaping-Ahead.” Looking at these through the lens of syntropy shows us exactly how one leads to human decay, while the other provides the necessary architecture for growth and freedom.

Heidegger helping himself to some water

The Mechanics of Care

Heidegger argued that humans are never just isolated individuals and being human is never a solo job. We’re fundamentally wired for “Being-with” (Mitsein), meaning our existence is constantly tangled up with others. He called the structural way we relate to people “Solicitude” (Fürsorge).² It’s his technical word for the care we direct toward other people, which isn’t an optional add-on but a basic way our existence is put together.

Think of it less as an emotional bond and more as a purely practical look at how we actually intervene in someone else’s life. When someone we know is facing a burden, like a tough choice, a complex project, or an existential crisis, we have to decide exactly how we’re going to step in.

The Entropic Path of “Leaping-In”

The first option is “Leaping-In” (einspringende). This happens when the helper steps directly into the other person’s shoes and takes over the burden. You just do the task for them.

Heidegger says that this “disburdens” the other person. On the surface, this looks like pure kindness. It’s taking the phone out of your dad’s hands to fix his settings rather than talking him through the menus. It’s feeding your mate the exact word-for-word text to send their partner during an argument. It’s getting ChatGPT to do your kid’s entire science project to save them the stress. But from a syntropic perspective, this is a degenerative force.

• Systemic Atrophy. By taking away the struggle, the helper removes the exact friction needed for growth. Just as our muscles waste away without physical resistance, taking away someone’s existential “care” leads to a shrinking of the self and robs them of their own “ability-to-be.”³

• Domination. Heidegger points out that Leaping-In actually “dominates” the other person, even if it’s done with a smile. It creates a dynamic of dependency where the helper is the active subject and the person being helped becomes a passive object to be managed.

• Entropy. Over time, something shrinks and the whole system loses complexity. Instead of two capable, autonomous people, you end up with one fixer and one who waits to be fixed. The helped person loses their knack for organising their own world and requires constant external input just to stay afloat.

The Syntropic Path of “Leaping-Ahead”

The alternative is “Leaping-Ahead” (vorspringende), which is a fundamentally different movement. The helper completely avoids taking on the burden. Instead, they leap ahead to clear the path, empowering the other person to carry the weight themselves.

Heidegger describes this as helping the other become “transparent” to themselves. You leave the actual problem-solving up to them, focusing entirely on helping them build the understanding they need to get there. This acts as a massive syntropic force.

• Generating Complexity. Leaping-Ahead requires the other person to stay in the driver’s seat. They have to organise their own thoughts and take action, which increases the total intelligence and resilience of the system.

• Self-Creation (Autopoiesis). By refusing to take the easy way out, you respect the other person’s struggle as their own. It gives them the space for self-creation. Because they fought the battle, they get to own the victory and the competence that comes with it.⁴

• True Freedom. The end goal of Leaping-Ahead is what Heidegger calls “Self-constancy” (Selbständigkeit). The person becomes free for their own possibilities, rather than just being free from their responsibilities.

The Biological Blind Spot

I do think Heidegger is missing a trick, though. Because he operated entirely in the realm of existential philosophy, he assumed that if you clear the path and hand the burden back to someone, they automatically have the capacity to carry it.

But as anyone who’s read my essays on Ray Peat knows, you need raw metabolic energy to be able to think, act, and engage meaningfully with the world.⁵ Syntropy isn’t just a philosophical idea but a real biological process driven by cellular energy.

If a person is depleted (i.e., hypothyroid, running on stress hormones, and lacking baseline metabolic energy), Leaping-Ahead might actually just leave them stranded. You can hold the space open for them all day long, but if they lack the energetic resources to participate in their own struggle, they’ll simply collapse.⁶

Grounding Heidegger in biology means recognising that true care sometimes requires helping someone restore their physical vitality first. You have to build the energetic foundation before you can demand existential responsibility.

Cosmic Salvation by Arthur Diehl (1920)

Leaping In and Diminishing Ourselves with AI

Even with the biological reality check, Heidegger’s distinction is basically a skeleton key for understanding our current weirdness with tech, especially AI.⁷ There’s no denying that we’re increasingly building a world completely saturated with “Leaping-In” tools.

Most software today anticipates, predicts, and auto-completes, lifting the burden off our plates before we even feel it. For mindless drudgery and busywork, that’s amazing. Nobody needs an authentic, character-building journey to format a spreadsheet or write a boilerplate corporate email.

The danger kicks in when we let these tools leap into the realm of human creativity and actual thinking. Generative AI is so good now it’s increasingly doing just that. It leaps right to the finish line, spitting out the final code, art, or essay, completely bypassing the messy, frustrating, and often brutal human process of creation.

Recently, my wife and I enjoyed the documentary series “Mr. Scorsese” about the life and career of the American filmmaker Martin Scorsese.⁸ It was directed by Rebecca Miller and took years to produce, morphing from an originally intended feature-length piece into a sprawling 5-parter. Miller has said that making it was one of the defining experiences of her career. And Scorsese’s own career is, of course, a legendary tale of obsessive struggle and suffering in the name of his craft. The friction of making some of the greatest films of all time is partly what forged his genius.

There’s a quote from him right in the trailer that captures this perfectly: “I knew I could express myself with pictures, but I had to find my own way.”

Contrast that with a typical example I saw just this week, where people are bragging about using AI to pump out “Hollywood-style” films in a single day:

We happily trade our agency for this convenience because it feels like a relief, but it’s a massive entropic trap. If we let tech leap in on the things that actually matter, our mental muscles waste away. We get so used to being “disburdened” that authoring our own lives starts to feel optional, and we start drifting through systems we don’t really understand.

A genuinely syntropic approach means taking responsibility for how we use the tools at our disposal. Right now, you can ask an AI to leap in and write your article, or you can ask it to leap ahead, instructing it to act as a sparring partner, to poke holes in your logic so you can navigate the terrain yourself. That keeps the heavy lifting of creation firmly on your own shoulders.

Holding the Space

At its core, Heidegger is reminding us that true care means prioritising a person’s authenticity (including our own) over their immediate comfort.

Leaping-In is the path of least resistance. It’s seductive and highly efficient, but it solves the immediate problem at the cost of diminishing the person. Leaping-Ahead is much harder. It takes real patience to watch someone you care about struggle, and the wisdom to know how to intervene just enough to empower them without taking over.

I don’t always know which mode I’m in. Sometimes I tell myself I’m empowering my Mam when I refuse to show her how to send an email for the 115th time, but maybe I’m just avoiding responsibility 😁. Other times I step in because I’m impatient, not because it’s wise.

Most of the time, being more syntropic just means biting your tongue and resisting the urge to take the wheel. And knowing you won’t always get the judgement right, learning to leap ahead and let others step fully into their own existence.

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If you want to go deeper down the notoriously deep rabbit hole of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Simon Critchley’s podcast series “Apply-Degger” is an excellent entry point.

1. Heidegger’s “the they” (das Man) refers to the anonymous, everyday public world that shapes most of our existence. It’s not a specific group of people, but the impersonal “one” we slip into when we say things like “one doesn’t do that” or “that’s just how things are done.” It’s the background chatter of social norms, gossip, fashion, and conventional thinking that tells us what to care about, what to fear, and how to act. When we’re absorbed in “the they,” we don’t live as distinct individuals facing our own mortality and choices. Instead, we become average, comfortable, and indistinguishable—letting public opinion dictate our possibilities rather than owning them ourselves. Heidegger saw this as the default mode of inauthentic existence, but also as something we can break from through authentic resoluteness.

2. Heidegger uses “solicitude” (Fürsorge) to name how we are with other people at the most basic, existential level. It’s the “with-others” side of care, as opposed to “concern” (Besorgen), which is how we deal with things and equipment. So when I cook, hammer, or type emails—that’s concern. When I help, ignore, dominate, encourage, or quietly support someone—that’s solicitude.

3. Heidegger’s “care” (Sorge) is the fundamental structure of human existence (Dasein). It’s not emotional caring but the basic way we are: always already stretched between past (thrownness into a situation we didn’t choose), present (absorption in the world of tasks and others), and future (projection toward possibilities, including death).

4. Autopoiesis (from auto = self, poiesis = making/creating) means self‑creation or self‑producing, and it’s a technical way of describing what makes a living system living. A system that continuously produces and maintains its own components and its own boundary, so that it keeps itself going as a distinct, coherent whole. It’s a way of saying: living systems aren’t just pushed around by the world; they have an internal organising principle that continually generates order from within.

5. Ray Peat and the Perception of Novelty (Substack Post)

6. The Hypothyroid Organisation (Substack Post)

7. Heidegger argues that technology’s essence is “enframing” (Gestell), a way of revealing where everything shows up as “standing-reserve” (resources to be optimised). This is a worldview that conceals other ways of revealing Being (art, dwelling, physis). He warns that we might forget richer meanings. But he insists, “where the danger is, grows the saving power also.” Technology reveals calculative power brilliantly; the task is “releasement” (Gelassenheit)—using it freely while staying open to more original disclosing. So not rejection or blind embrace, but a thoughtful both/and.

8. Mr. Scorsese is a five-part documentary series about filmmaker Martin Scorsese, directed by Rebecca Miller and released on Apple TV+. It weaves together long-form interviews with Scorsese, material from his personal archives, and conversations with close collaborators and friends such as Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day‑Lewis, Thelma Schoonmaker, and others, tracing his life, work, obsessions, and the moral and spiritual questions running through his films.