The drive towards ever-increasing disorder (entropy) and the drive towards refinement and complexity both shape the trajectory of the universe. While the second law of thermodynamics tells us that overall entropy and disorder will go up, local regions of lower entropy can exist at the expense of generating heat that dissipates into the wider world.
The universe is asymmetric in time due to the fact that entropy is expanding. Physics explains that time does not exist in this universe as spreading things out is the foundation of the second law of entropy.
Putting things into a longer-term perspective can reveal that outcomes are not always as they seem, and may have positive outcomes in the end despite appearing negative at first glance due to the oscillation of life's ups and downs.
The entropy of a stationary Markovian dynamics is constant, meaning that there is no entropic time. However, any projection made of that dynamics by conditional probability will have increasing entropy, resulting in entropic time.
This podcast episode explores how people might be experiencing ambiguous loss in times of uncertainty and change, and the importance of developing tools to cope with such loss.