I've written in the past about my interest in the vague abstraction of "spoons", the familiar term used by neurodivergent and disabled persons to describe the feeling of having only so much energy for a task, and if that store is exhausted, then you're not able to get going. I've hoped to put some more definition to the idea, analyzing it further. And I admit that I've hoped to figure out how to restore "spoons" by some relatively facile action, a spell for spoons in magical terms.

Yesterday—trying to force us through operating in the outside world when our "spoons" were already redlined, which is always a "fun" state of existence especially now that I'm so much weaker—one thought occurred to me about the "spoons" business, which was: no matter how "spoons" actually works on a material and physical level, the general notion of having only a certain amount of juice set aside for initiating certain tasks is eminently a plausible one. One could think of it like the "activation energy" for a chemical reaction—there's a high energy barrier intrinsic to causing atoms and molecules to depart from their steady-state configurations, and the higher that barrier, the slower the reaction. In chemical reactions that activation-energy barrier is highly dependent upon the chemical environment surrounding the reaction, which is why catalysis (whether by naturally occurring enzymes or painstakingly handcrafted organometallic complexes) is such a big thing in chemistry.

It seems reasonable to guess that initiating tasks as an organic being must surely have its own "activation energy" that's highly dependent upon circumstances, just like chemical reactions—after all, doesn't "initiating a task" as an organic lifeform basically come down to initiating sequences of chemical reactions? your body at rest, in a pleasant (or at least endurable) state of homeostasis, requires some sharp burst of energy to overcome the activation energy required to start a job—hence, if you're out of spoons, you're not able to supply that initial burst. so people need their rest and their relaxation and a stress-free life in order to have the maximum amount of spare energy to do jobs, right? sensible, isn't it?

well...not to capitalism, it isn't. in capitalism, nobody doing a real job is suppose to have "spoons"; or maybe it's better to say that they're supposed to have infinite, inexhaustible "spoons". the "good worker" is supposed to do a task when they're ordered to; their physical and mental state aren't supposed to be relevant at all. I suppose their boss would tell them that a "good worker" can simply overcome an infinite amount of fatigue at will; after all the boss works so very hard and you don't see them complaining, do you? capitalist leadership has been driven into a fierce, willful ignorance of the physical and mental limitations of human beings—even if some better person than me could clearly demonstrate the physico-chemical basis of "spoons" and rigorously prove that human beings really do hit hard limits on how much work they can do, the leadership class would simply scoff at it and produce their own "research" from their own ecosystem of right-wing academic charlatans that purported to show no such limitations existed. capitalism is practically forced to pretend that human beings are infinitely mouldable, infinitely powerful even—if hammered into the right shape first—and that somewhere out there is an infinite supply of Good Workers™ who don't have any of these pesky issues with "activation energy".

I guess, failing that, there's always "AI".

~Chara