Sprawl is entropy

By doing more things you increase your surface area for luck, they say. Depending on how you build, you also increase your surface area for entropy.

There is a house on my walking route I watched empty out. Nobody broke a window. The lawn just came in tall, then weeds, and the whole transformation was accomplished by no one doing anything. I kept slowing down in front of it because I own a house too, and because the word sprawling had been stuck to me for months—the files, the projects, the apparatus I run my life through.

The thing that unstuck it: not every addition costs the same. Some surfaces you maintain so that later you can use them. Some you maintain by using them. Only one of those is still standing a year later.