May, 2026

There are two mental models about work and fatigue which, like my brief dalliance with Roshe Runs, I have loved and outgrown: The first is the fungibility of fatigue. Also known as the spoon theory,1To be clear, my point is with the colloquial extension of spoon theory to able-bodied people like myself, and not the chronic illness context in which it was coined. it is roughly the notion that everything we do — from the mundane (brushing one's teeth, taking a shower) to the expensive (entering flow state for four hours of incident response) — carries some vaguely quantitative measure of toil, all of it drawn from a single reservoir over the course of the day. Like a wizard spending mana to cast spells at varying levels. This model, like all models, is useful insofar as it offers some bit of truth: for everyone there is an innate drain from everything we do, even the things we don't think of as draining, and both those numbers and the size of the central reservoir vary from person to…