I often see people online refer to themselves as “spoonies” or as “not having enough spoons”, and I have no idea what this means. Can someone explain??
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The spoon theory refers to an article written back in the early 2000’s that used the somewhat whimsical spoon based metaphor for the energy we have available to do daily tasks.
The idea is that we start out each day with a limited amount of spoons, and everything we choose to do during the course of that day requires us to give up/hand over some of those spoons – many people have large spoon supplies available and can freely spend them doing activities, but many of us have a much more limited supply available to use and need to ration how we use them.
As an alternative you could equally reference the mana/energy systems used in many games, having to spend money, fuel or any other resource – the spoon theory was just a very good description of this idea, and whimsical enough to stick in the memories of a lot of people.
So when someone says they don’t have enough spoons left over, what they are meaning is that they are too tired (either physically or mentally) and need a break.
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