The Spoon Theory (2003)

I try to tell myself that comments like GP's come from a place of taking one's health for granted, and have only experienced sickness from eating junk food or not sleeping enough.

I have a genetic disorder that makes me fragile, chronically ill, and limits my mobility. I do PT every day for 30-45 minutes - I've never missed a day since September. I eat healthy vegan food and sleep as much as I can (though painsomnia makes this hard.)

I'm doing all the right things, but I'm still sick. If I didn't do the right things, I'd be sicker. I'm still quite limited, and have to carefully plan things that my able-bodied friends take for granted. That's spoon theory.

What choices do you mean? I'd say that healthy people have more freedom so they have more choices to make. When you come down to it health is about freedom. Freedom from preoccupying pain, constricting impairment, freedom to do whatever. Choices are a symptom of freedom. We must have a different definition somewhere in here. Haven't read the article yet.

Edit: Having read the story, the spoons are a metaphor for units of personal energy required to do a basic everyday task, and the choices, as used in above quote, are compromises you have to make when you have too little spoons to do everything you'd like.

Edit2: man, it's easy to get downvoted in this thread. Do I come off as unsympathetic or something? I've been depressed for most of my life, so spoon-shortage isn't exactly new ground for me.

For what it's worth, I think that while freedom is everyone's ultimate goal, whether they comprehend it or not, it's not necessary for happiness (and not the same as happiness). Happiness is about accepting what is (whatever it might be). Unhappiness is about rejecting what is. To say that happiness depends on what you can do, is to project your internal rejection onto the external "capability", thus retreating to the comfort of not owning your own feelings.

Of course, if someone said "take this pill and you'll be able to do everything" I'd down the whole bottle, but that's because I'd rather circumvent the symptom, than face my own addiction to powerlessness.

Another way of looking at this:

Everybody has experienced having a flu. Everybody knows that feeling when you’re sick, and suddenly you realise how much you take for granted when you aren’t. In fact, you even start to _envy_ those around you who haven’t got whatever bug you have!

Being chronically ill is like living in that world permanently.

I work by effort/benefit ratio. Many programmers start ambitious projects with very high effort and low benefit, like e.g. a browser/os/videogame/library which they maintain at expense of their health and limited time. Low effort, small-scale projects with immediate benefit/utility are much less taxing on health and don't require constant maintenance. Unix way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy#Do_One_Thing_a...

Fully departing from spoon theory, but sticking with money and motorcycles, this story was told to me by a friend of mine. This was a few decades ago and he was into racing Ducatis.

The wise old man at the track was explaining how to go fast. The people in the garage that night didn’t seem to be getting it, so everyone got in the back of the Ford van they used for parts and the old man drove.

“You have a dollar to spend. You can spend it on acceleration, braking, or turning. You need to be spending the whole dollar all the time.”

He was coming into a turn faster than any Ford engineer would have expected, gas to the floor. “I’m still spending the dollar on the gas.” He switched to the brakes, slamming them without skidding. The guys slid to the front of the van. “Now the brakes, I’m spending the whole thing. And then to turning.” The guys hit the side of the van.

This continued on, him ranting about dollars while driving around the track. My friend timed the lap and it was embarrassingly close to what they did on their Ducatis. That old man speed.