Moreover, within the interior of a soap bubble there is a constant volume of air. Among the countless number of shapes that one could imagine a bubble taking, there is exactly one form that minimizes surface area while preserving volume, and that shape is a perfect sphere. Similarly, a soap bubble in any shape other than a sphere is in a high energy state. As the bubble changes from non-sphere to sphere shape, it may overshoot the desired goal and temporarily move in the wrong direction, just as a rolling ball can be carried beyond the low point of a valley to momentarily move uphill. Balls can temporarily move uphill as long as they have sufficient momentum to do so.
Momentum is responsible for the wavy motion that a bubble experiences as well.
With this definition of total energy, a dissipative system will always move from a state of higher energy into a state of lower energy, and it will never go uphill. The energy doesn't just disappear, however. Instead, it is transformed and moved outside of the system, usually as friction but ultimately as heat. The lowly bubble and the mundane ball both turn out to be useful metaphors for distributed dynamical systems that can compute interesting things. Surface area is not a property of soap-water molecules, but of an entire soap film.