I love this stuff. Like the one definition of death being an organism dying is one that starts failing to maintain itself. Maintenance being the essence of being alive. Or in other words creating local order by sourcing energy from the environment and thus increasing entropy outside the organism.

The laws of thermodynamics are so universal and primordial, they even preceed all of fundamental physics. And once you "get them" which is more like accepting them to be universally true, you can use them to evaluate and explain a lot of things. They help you decern reality from magic for instance, or magical thinking. Ideas that would only work if the second law of thermodynamics makes an exception is magic and therefore impossible in this universe.