What if everything you thought you knew about existence was hiding a disturbing truth?

Every time you eat, you perform an act of destruction. Every breath you take requires the transformation of prior structure. Every thought in your mind has a physical cost. This is not philosophy or metaphor. It is thermodynamic law.

In this groundbreaking work, Boris Kriger presents a unified theory of persistence that reveals why existence itself has a cost, and why that cost must be paid in transformed structure. Drawing on physics, biology, neuroscience, and information theory, Kriger shows that from stars to bacteria, from computers to human minds, all organized systems maintain themselves only by dismantling other organized systems.

But this is not a counsel of despair. Through a radical reinterpretation of the ancient symbol of the ouroboros and a rigorous analysis of what physics tells us about time, Kriger offers an unexpected resolution to the tragedy of consumption. In the atemporal view of the universe, what appears to be destruction reveals itself as eternal relationship.

The Cost of Being will change how you think about eating, about consciousness, about the nature of reality, and about your own place in the structural economy of the universe.