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Comment by AlexTWithBeard | Hacker News Reader

I've just learned about this spoon analogy and absolutely loved it.

What's better, it's not just about disabilities. You've got kids to take care of? Here goes one spoon. You are not a native speaker and a bit slow in getting what others say? Here goes another one. A sick spouse at home? The third and the last one is gone and that's when things become interesting!

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I don't really know if I'm comfortable applying spoon theory to contexts outside of disabilities (and even outside of chronic illness). In the context of chronic illness going out of one's spoons has serious, long-term, immediate, and maybe debilitating repercussions for the person in the management of their condition. The original context was that someone has like 10 spoons that day, and showering is 2 spoons and clothing onessels is 2 more spoons unless a piece of clothing has buttons which makes it 3 spoons due to joint pain in the hands. This was in order to show how incredibly resource intensive chronic illness management is and how it limits a lifestyle.

It is a much different thing than having to take care of a child, not being a native speaker, or having a sick spouse, which describe additional difficulties onto an otherwise functional human being. Spoon theory explicitly applies to the context in which fundamentally functional actions like self-care take significantly more resources than expected.

I have some concern that this is actually a dilution of the original meaning such that it removes its original usefullness to the chronically ill community, which has to deal with the stigma of being potentially severely limited with an "invisible" illness, and the spoon theory was an attempt to describe the "invisible" illness's effect on a person's life (therefore aiding in destigmatization). By diluting the original meaning, we may be contributing to the continued stigmatizing of "invisible" illnesses, as now spoon theory is changed to mean something almost opposite of its original meaning.

I hear what you say and indeed, on one hand the dilution may be seen as a problem.

On the other hand, do we really want to build this wall by saying there are chronically ill people, there are healthy people and these two crowds are governed by completely different rules, have absolutely orthogonal problems and no parallels can be drawn between them to avoid the "dilution"?

Or we'd rather say that disabled people's problems are the same as healthy people's problems, just worse and affect your life in more aspects? Wouldn't that remove the stigma and help us understand each other better?

The problem is that this example is applying spoon theory to an almost completely different situation due to a misunderstanding of the theory as a result of continued dilution of its meaning to adapt the theory to non-chronic illness situations. In this way, it portrays spoon theory as a way to generally describe overburdening onesself with responsibilities who is otherwise functional, when spoon theory was originally meant to describe the significant effort in fundamental functioning. The original meaning, the meaning that applies to chronically ill people, is arguably entirely lost.

Disabled people's problems are not the same as healthy people's problems. Spoon theory was a way to describe exactly how it's not the same.

[x] people's problems are not the same as [y] people's problems

Maybe this helps to build understanding across x and y initially, but maintaining a hard and impassible empathic barrier between groups will eventually lead people to say, "Why should I care, every time I try to relate they say I'm not one of them?"

In this specific case, why is it such a bad thing to expand a metaphor for costs to build that shared empathy? Then we can all relate to each other better.

The metaphor isn't being expanded. It's being actively changed to no longer apply to the original situation. No shared empathy is being built because the situation being empathized with is not the original situation that the spoons theory was originally propgatated by.

Building empathy is the skill of identifying with situations that are not one's personal situations. Arguably, "expanding" a metaphor to suit one's personal situation is the opposite of fostering empathy.

EDIT: Towards "Why should I care, every time I try to relate they say I'm not one of them?" -> The spoon theory was not explicitly to be related to. It was a way to abstract a very real problem that has been broadly minimized into a finite situation in order to explain a phenomenon that a healthy person explicitly does not need to deal with and cannot relate to. It would be similar to me explaining a technical problem with metaphor; I'm not asking for you to relate to the problem. I'm asking you to understand the problem.

As for why should you care? Because this person is in a lot of pain and is dealing with a lot of difficulties that I'm not dealing with, and in fact, upwards of 40% (more maybe) of people in my country (USA) have a chronic/incurable condition. The scale of the problem means that developing a compassionate, understanding view will greatly benefit a significant portion of people one may meet.

Gatekeeping this intuitively universal spoon metaphor isn't going to make disabled people's lives better. A world where only disabled people get to use the spoon metaphor isn't going to have any more people feeling compassionate and empathic toward disabled people. The extension of an idea or metaphor to new situations doesn't devalue it; rather it shows that it is a powerful and useful idea. And before you make baseless claims, I also suffer from a chronic and incurable condition.

"Disabled people's problems are not the same as healthy people's problems"

Do we have any reason to think that health status / disability is discrete rather than continuous?

My main concern is that spoon theory might help to create and reinforce self-limiting beliefs. Most people are stronger and more resilient than they think, even if they have a chronic illness or a disability. We all have limits, but it's dangerous to think about those limits as hard and fixed.

I'm reminded of Ludwig Guttmann, who founded the Paralympic Games and revolutionised the care of people with spinal cord injuries. Prior to Guttmann, the received wisdom was that paraplegics would inevitably die within a few years from a variety of complications; the standard treatment was simply palliative. Guttmann realised that paraplegics could live long, active and meaningful lives with the right programme of physical and psychological rehabilitation. His approach was tough bordering on brutal, but it saved and transformed thousands of lives.

I worry that spoon theory nudges us back towards old attitudes to chronic illness and disability that define people in terms of their limits rather than their abilities. We can't pretend that everyone has the same opportunities and capabilities, but it doesn't help anyone to think of ability as a finite resource that is continually depleted. We all have the opportunity to develop and grow.

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