It's a very catchy abstraction/metaphor. It did lodge itself in my brain quite firmly once I learned of it. It can feel defeatist to acknowledge such limits in

It's a very catchy abstraction/metaphor. It did lodge itself in my brain quite firmly once I learned of it. It can feel defeatist to acknowledge such limits in concrete terms, but you gotta work with what you got... I know people who are comfortable saying "i'm all out of spoons/only have a few spoons left"; it's pretty useful as frameworks go, and hard to express these things so succinctly in other ways. Just saying, e.g. "I'm drained" doesn't cover it when "drained" is the baseline.