The Spoon Theory Or The Monopoly Theory: Which Is Best?
Spoon Theory
“What is the spoon theory? It all began with a personal essay written by Christine Miserandino in 2003, about her experiences of living with a chronic illness called Lupus. In this essay, based on an occasion when she was dining in a café with her best friend, she uses spoons from the table in front of her to try and describe to her friend what living with fatigue and severely limited energy feels like.
She explains how everybody begins their day with a certain number of ‘spoons’, and how when a person is non-disabled, they expect to have a never-ending supply at their disposal. Usually, they can do all the things they want or need to do. Each of their daily chores or activities would cost them a spoon, leaving fewer for the rest of the day. By nighttime, their supply may be running low, but they would wake up the next morning with a replenished amount of spoons, ready to begin again.
How to use Spoon theory - starting with 12 spoons, you use them during the day and then need to recover once they are used up.
For people with chronic illness or long-term health conditions, however, things are different. The author explains how even the smallest parts of their day, even something as seemingly simple as reaching to grab an item from a high shelf in the kitchen, can require precious spoons to accomplish. Therefore, every moment of the day has to be meticulously planned and paced in order to get through. If a person runs out of spoons during the day, they can ‘borrow’ from tomorrow’s supply, but this can lead to them feeling even worse the next morning. And because of fluctuating symptoms, you can never know how many spoons you’ll be working with on a given day. Even if a person does everything right and manages their condition to the best of their ability, they often have very little control over how much useable energy is at their disposal.”
- Excerpt (and the below images) cited from Hidden Disabilities, click here for the original webpage.
Spoon Theory Controversy
Spoon Theory became really popular in the disability community and then even those without a disability or chronic pain started using it. Maybe you’ve heard of the Spoon Theory before? As it started to grow, more people could see how it applied to them too. And that created some heated conversations. The community of people who first felt validated and seen by the Spoon Theory didn’t want to share it, sharing it with everyone minimizes its truth. There became an “us vs them” dialogue about this metaphor. I was surprised when I discovered this in a Threads feed I was following.
Here’s a snapshot of the controversy (this came up when I searched “spoon theory” in Threads, no other prompts, I have anonymized the user names) -
[Description: The image features a series of social media posts from Threads discussing Spoon Theory. The posts are formatted as a vertical thread, each with a different coloured bunny icon representing the user.
Pink Bunny, 12/05/2024:
“We need to stop saying "Everyone has the same hours in a day as Beyonce!" Learning about Spoon theory has really helped me with this language.Spoon theory was originally created to discuss the physical and mental load people with Chronic Illness manage, but it can work for all of us. You use Spoons as a measurement for how much energy you have in a day. Let's say I start out with 12 spoons of energy: single, no kids, work from home.” The post has 449 likes, 139 comments, and 32 shares.
Teal Bunny, 12/05/2024:
“Please don't use spoon theory if you don't have a chronic illness. It's specifically about how regular, daily life activities cost 'spoons' for people who live with chronic conditions and how they may be able to get through things SOMETIMES but other times even getting out of bed is impossible because they don't have enough spoons for that. There are days when people with chronic health problems can't walk downstairs. THAT'S what the analogy exists for.” The post has 93 likes, 4 comments, and no shares.
Aqua Bunny, 06/15/2024):
“DisabilityThreads how do y'all feel about not-disabled folx without chronic illness using spoons to describe being tired or burnt out? I'm...irritated by it. FWIW I was an OG moderator on the butyoudontlooksick.com forums (started by Christine Miserandino, the author of The Spoon Theory) ~20 years ago. I spent years in remission not being disabled & now consider myself disabled again.” The post has 68 likes, 118 comments, and 3 shares.
Purple Bunny, 06/2024:
“Tbh I think gatekeeping spoon theory probably feels really good but there are folks who never would have realized they were chronically ill, or found language to describe what they were experiencing, if we tried to keep that language inside the community it originated from. It’s okay to share sometimes.” The post has 13 likes and no comments or shares.]
Spoons, Can’t We Use a Better Metaphor?
While the Spoon Theory gave me an “AHA” moment shortly after I lost my hearing, I always felt like it was limiting and a bit flawed as a metaphor. Who even uses spoons for measuring? Uhmm, as I typed that the thought of a Baker popped into my head 😂 Either way, it’s not a common tool of measurement and it’s not working for me.
I also believe that the metaphor for energy could be more inclusive of everyone. I’m in the “it can apply to everyone” and not the “me vs you” metaphor camp. When we exclude people and their experiences from ours it creates more difficulty for empathy. I believe that for some of us to empathize we need to compare it to our own experiences, even if our own experiences are only 1/10th of that experienced by the one we’re trying to understand. We can take that 1% of our experience and multiply it by 10 to try to understand another’s lived experience. But if we’re going from nothing and trying to understand with no comparables it’s much harder and maybe we don’t believe it’s a thing. I’m sure we have all met someone who didn’t seem capable of compassion or immediately shut down others’ lived experiences and beliefs. I feel it’s because they need that common denominator first. So a metaphor which allows that would be better.
The Monopoly Theory
Here’s my newly minted idea (it’s a work in progress) to replace or build off of the Spoon Theory. Feel free to share your own ideas or build off of mine in the comments. First, a refresher on Monopoly, below is an image of the classic board game.
[Description: a classic Monopoly game board, a square grid divided into various property spaces, utilities, railroads, and special spaces. The background is pale green, and the center features the iconic "MONOPOLY" logo in bold white letters on a red rectangular background, along with the mascot "Rich Uncle Pennybags," a man with a top hat and cane.]
Key Elements of the Board:
Properties are organized by color groups with increasing values as the board progresses.
"Go to Jail" directing players to the Jail space.
"Jail" where players lose two turns or escape by rolling doubles or pay $50 to get out.
"Free Parking" where you win the lottery (money meant to go to the bank in my house rules).
“Go” where players start and collect $200 upon passing. Roll doubles and you get $400.
"Chance" and "Community Chest" spaces are marked with icons for drawing cards that have rewards or penalties.
"Income Tax" and "Super Tax" spaces require payments to the bank.
Railroads and utilities (e.g., "Electric Company") are spread across the board.
Everyone can play Monopoly, it’s a board game, an App, even a McDonalds marketing campaign. It’s the great unifier! Except we’re not playing for money and properties, we’re playing for energy and our capacity to do all the things on our never-ending to do lists.
We start by passing the “Go” space and collect our energy reward, $200, cool! Next turn, you land on a property, in this game it’s a task. It’s a cheap task first, shower, you hand over your $20 and you can complete the task. Later you land on an expensive task like going to a friends birthday party, that’s going to be $110, okay this round you have the budget, so you complete the task. And on you go. This all works fine when you have enough money to complete your tasks, you have the energy.
Except, you don’t always have enough in your budget, you have a round where it seems like you land on expensive tasks each time and then you run out of money so you need to borrow money. You go to jail or pay fines, you’re struggling and your friends are laughing because you need to mortgage your monopoly properties.
But then there’s a round where you’re on fire, you’ve landed on a Chance card that gives you $100 from each of your friends, you’ve landed on Free Parking and won the lottery, you have a surplus of money and you can achieve all the tasks and some extra ones this round.
When you’re playing and you have a deficit, it can feel like everyone else is playing and always winning, they’re rolling doubles and getting paid more at “Go”, they have a Utility property that gives them generous bonuses (more $$) and they never seem to need to borrow to pay for their tasks.
When You’re Playing With a Deficit
I play Monopoly with a deficit, I need to keep close tabs on my money coming in and going out for tasks. I need to budget so I don’t go to “Jail” for two turns (sit out until I have the energy to do my tasks again).
I am hard of hearing, I wear hearing aids, rely on speech reading and live captioning and a multitude of things, I have a disability. I have also had periods in my life where I struggled with depression, mental health while it can be temporary can also cause a deficit.
For me to play Monopoly I typically spend more than I make in return. So I need to budget how I spend my $200 by passing “Go” wisely.
These are some of my gaming strategies (energy hacks):
I plan social events so they’re spread out, so once around the board will only have one big social event
I consider how many people will be involved in any task or event, 1:1 interactions are low cost tasks, 2:1 are medium, and 3+ are high cost. Where the interaction is happening will also adjust the cost of the event, is there a lot of background noise, or is it a quiet setting?
I give myself time outs, I voluntarily hang out in jail or pace the board slower so I can reenergize.
Working from home means I can do more with less energy. I actually like the idea of Hybrid because I miss people and often have the capacity to do in-person work, just not every day.
I have assistive devices that help level the playing field, like live captioning during online meetings, subtitles when watching TV, table microphones that connect to my hearing aids when I’m in board meetings, clip-on mics that connect to my hearing aid when there’s a presenting speaker, etc.
Except this is a board game, so there are other players and they are unpredictable, there’s tasks that pop up that you’re not prepared for or tried to avoid. And they suck up your budget.
These unpredictable budget suckers for me include:
Having coffee with one person and more people show up (1:1 turns into 4:1)
A business or person not allowing or setting up their event with live captioning, meaning I need to rely on speech reading which uses more energy
Someone stops by spontaneously or the Sailor plans something that involves me but didn’t give me enough forewarning
Not enough sleep
The weather. Yep, sometimes I wake up extra deaf or a loud humming in my ears and my hearing aids just don’t do enough, thanks to air pressure changes
Bad mental health days, some days there’s just a big weight on your chest and you can’t shake it off
And then I find myself hanging out in the “Jail” space until I have enough energy to play again. And sometimes this is unplanned jail time at really inconvenient moments as if you landed on the “go to jail” space instead of “just visiting” the jail space.
We’re All Playing But Some Of Us Take Longer To Go Around The Board
I’ve been saying that some of us take longer to go around the Monopoly board, because when I think of my budget, I usually plan for one week, that’s how long my Monopoly money lasts. I believe some people only need to budget for the day, their trip around the board is 24 hours and they feel low on their money in the evening and refreshed with a new budget every morning. Good for them, that must feel AMAZING!
There will also be people who take two weeks or a month or more. This is where it gets down to you, your specific budget, your specific experiences.
And in this model, it creates the space to include disability, chronic pain, mental health, burnout, illness, challenges due to discrimination - there is more than one reason that could lead to your Monopoly game being harder.
This way, we can all hopefully better grasp that someone else is trying to play Monopoly too and maybe we’ve experienced their struggle or maybe we’ve simply experienced how challenging it is when our round didn’t go as planned. From this 1% of understanding, we can empathize with the struggle and with another persons lived experiences.