What makes the past different from the future?

Abastract: I will summarize work on the direction of time I have developed in the last few years.  I studied how the temporal orientation of memories, traces, agency, and causation, can (all) be physically understood as effects of the entropy gradient and the existence of metastable states, via two independent roots: the actual dissipative aspects of these phenomena, and the irreversible nature of the observer, understood as a physical system.   Time permitting, I will also illustrate the hypothesis of the perspectival nature of the entropy gradient itself.