system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
This might be a dumb question, but why does anything, organic or otherwise, degrade and/or eventually break?

In this case I'm mainly thinking about organic beings and/material- why do we age, when we seem to be pretty efficient machines for processing food, energy, water and producing energy etc. I guess this applies to artificial or inorganic machines as well. Why do things continually degrade? I assume this has something to do with atomic structures?

Thanks, this is a great community!
gpt
In short, entropy. A layman's version is that all matter inevitably tends toward disorder. Matter is trapped energy and it is thermodynamically favorable for it to degenerate into heat energy. This means that work must be done to counteract trend. Left to their own devices, all physical things will eventually deteriorate. All it takes is time.