Intuitions fit for most everyday life tend to see survival-as-usual as a default-state-of-things.
Death is seen as a special case, an active exception which occasionally invades into the default case of continuing life.
Though this fits a lot of human experience, the universe at large would disagree.
If you pick a random point in spacetime and put a person there, they will die pretty instantly, with approximately 100% probability.
Finality, or retrocausality, or as I will now call it, desire, is a property of systems where nearly all initial conditions will converge to the same final state.
The more complex the convergence, the more "intentional" it seems, but I won't be worrying about that here.
In any random system, nearly the whole volume of statespace containing a living thing will immediately converge into a volume of statespace which does not contain a living thing.
This is not some mystery- it is simple entropy.
There are overwhelmingly more ways for things to be broken than fixed; more ways to be messy than organized; and more ways to be dead than alive.
Thus the universe desires death.
Though life-as-a-whole "finds a way", individual lives are fragile.
What the universe likes is replicator metasystems, not so much the individual replicators within them.
One can only exist under a system of conditions which actively work to sustain it.
If some component of your causal environment isn't actively supporting you, then with overwhelming likelihood, it's trying to kill you.
There is a lot of laughing and crying over government and police corruption, failures of healthcare systems, other support systems, social injustices, and so on.
The world always fails to live up to the expected default-state-of-things that exists in our heads-
a hypothetical system which operates on our personal values, with the flourishing of life and goodness as an a priori attractor, independent of any conditions which would work to support or inhibit it.
The world is fair and just, all humans are created equal, wrongdoing will be met with punishment, and all good moral acts will be rewarded, yes?
Physics bows to morality?
When put in such explicit terms, it appears unremarkably false, but bad intuitions are deeply embedded nonetheless.
To me, corruption does not feel like some special evil invading on the ideal case.
The fact there is any noncorruption is something I find more surprising.
Where does the usual mistaken intuition come from?
Maybe it's a simple mixing of value with belief- the tendency toward beliefs which are more comfortable.
There is also a marketing angle, of systems all striving to convince you they have your interests in mind, as a part of their own functioning.
Even beyond that, as agential critters ourselves, we rely on our ability to recognize hypothetical ideals, and feel pain at their absence, motivating us to work toward making them reality.
Then comes the anthropomorphizing intution which sees social systems as agents on a shared social playing field of reason which you can modify by arguing at.
Maybe if we just critique capitalism harshly enough, it will see the error of its ways, and have a change of heart?
(Nevermind how shoddily this works even for individuals...)
What must be internalized, then, is that any large-scale social system which supports you will only persist insofar as its support for you operationally feeds back into perpetuating its persistence.
If it has an opportunity to perpetuate itself more effectively without supporting you, it will likely take it.
And again- if it has causal power over you, but it isn't supporting you, then it's killing you.
Then perhaps, it is a miracle that anything works in our favor at all?
If the universe wants me dead so badly, it's amazing I've managed to live so long.
Well, having to call things "miracles" is a clear sign of misunderstanding.
The values of systems-as-a-whole do not exactly reflect the values of the indiviuals within them, but they aren't unrelated either.
As it happens, cooperation is often a pretty good strategy, and systems composed of humans will have a hard time existing if they aren't at all interested in sustaining their components.
You may even find small-scale systems which support you somewhat independently of your ability to reciprocate (eg your family).
At these scales, your individual steering power is more significant relative to the whole, and thus you will be more important for it to accommodate.
As scale increases, this condition gradually falls away.
For us to be living, it must be that our large-scale environment is a special one which doesn't want us dead quite so badly.
Maybe most of it wants you dead, but part of it really needs you alive.
Maybe you're lucky enough to temporarily survive on the indifferent excrement of some system which only mildly dislikes you.
The anthropic principle demands we find ourselves here, alive and well-enough, but it doesn't demand anything about the future.
How long this will last is anyone's guess.