The Thoughts Loom

  I was thinking about psychoanalysis recently, and initially I understood it as looking behind an action from the lens of an individual's history and experiences, especially those experiences that are somehow pushed into the subconscious but still influence what a person does. For example, whenever an exam  approaches, someone becomes ill. You ask what they feel, and the answer is that they want to score well. Then you ask, what exactly do you feel in those days? Maybe the answer takes some time, but eventually it becomes, "I am not good enough and I have to win approval." Then you start asking where that feeling comes from, and perhaps there was childhood comparison, perhaps there was no basic sense of security, perhaps the person learned that being good enough was necessary for approval. If you keep going backwards like this, you are not only looking at what the person did. You are trying to understand why that particular thing means what it means to that particular pe...

  What is waste? It is one of those words we use with remarkable confidence and very little reflection. We waste food, time, opportunities, money, talent and, on particularly difficult days, even our lives. The meaning seems so obvious that the question itself almost feels unnecessary. Yet the more I thought about it, the less obvious it became. "Waste" seems like a simple word, but it depends entirely on what standard you judge it by. Here are a few ways to think about it. Physics: Waste does not really exist. Matter and energy are transformed, not destroyed. What is waste to one process becomes a resource for another. Biology: Waste is a byproduct that an organism cannot use and must expel. Economics: Waste is a resource that has lower value than it could have had. Throwing away edible food is waste because its potential value is lost. Engineering: Waste is inefficiency—energy, material, or time that does not contribute to the desired output. Human life: We usua...