Finite Resource Quotes

Remember too that your time is your one finite resource, and when you say “yes” to one thing you are inevitably saying “no” to another.

One of the most jolting days of adulthood comes the first time you run out of toilet paper. Toilet paper, up until this point, always just existed. And now it's a finite resource, constantly in danger of extinction, that must be carefully tracked and monitored, like pandas?

The wasting of finite resources is everyones business

I have never considered compassion a finite resource. I would not want to live in a world where such was the case.

The past is a finite resource.

Death is a tragedy whether it is in the death of one girl-woman in London or seventy-seven men, women, and children in Norway. We know this, but perhaps it needs to be said over and over again so we do not forget. I have never considered compassion a finite resource. I would not want to live in a world where such was the case.

He believes that willpower is not a finite resource but instead acts like an emotion. Just as we don’t “run out” of joy or anger, willpower ebbs and flows in response to what’s happening to us and how we feel.

The key is remembering that anything you buy and don’t use, anything you throw away, anything you consume and don’t enjoy is money down the drain, wasting your life energy and wasting the finite resources of the planet. Any waste of your life energy means more hours lost to the rat race, making a dying. Frugality is the user-friendly and earth-friendly lifestyle.

We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared.

Love is like sunlight,” she said when I didn't respond. “You can give all of yourself to someone and still have all of yourself left to give to others, and to yourself. To your work. To anything or anyone you choose. Love isn't like food; you won't starve anyone by giving It freely. It's not a finite resource.

Why is it so easy to believe that a mother’s love isn’t a zero-sum proposition, but that sexual love is a finite resource?

An environment of infinite economic expansion is unsustainable in a world of finite resources.

You remember those twin statues of the Buddha that I told you about? Carved out of a mountain in Afghanistan, that got dynamited by the Taliban back in the spring? Notice anything familiar?" "Twin Buddhas, twin towers, interesting coincidence, so what." "The Trade Center towers were religious too. They stood for what this country worships above everything else, the market, always the holy fucking market." "A religious beef, you're saying?" "It's not a religion? These are people who believe the Invisible Hand of the Market runs everything. They fight holy wars against competing religions like Marxism. Against all evidence that the world is finite, this blind faith that resources will never run out, profits will go on increasing forever, just like the world's populations--more cheap labor, more addicted consumers.

Success is not a finite resource; share it, wish it on others, and celebrate others

Willpower is more than just a metaphor; self-control is a finite resource. Frontal neurons are expensive cells, and expensive cells are vulnerable cells. Consistent

When you are young and healthy, you believe you will live forever. You do not worry about losing any of your capabilities. People tell you “the world is your oyster,” “the sky is the limit,” and so on. And you are willing to delay gratification—to invest years, for example, in gaining skills and resources for a brighter future. You seek to plug into bigger streams of knowledge and information. You widen your networks of friends and connections, instead of hanging out with your mother. When horizons are measured in decades, which might as well be infinity to human beings, you most desire all that stuff at the top of Maslow’s pyramid—achievement, creativity, and other attributes of “self-actualization.” But as your horizons contract—when you see the future ahead of you as finite and uncertain—your focus shifts to the here and now, to everyday pleasures and the people closest to you.

the most finite, limited resource in our lives is time. We only have a finite amount of time to live. Why waste it?

Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill.

Willpower is more than just a metaphor; self-control is a finite resource.

Avoid creating a hierarchy of human suffering as if compassion were a finite resource.

We are trapped within an economic system that has it backward; it behaves as if there is no end to what is actually finite (clean water, fossil fuels, and the atmospheric space to absord their emissions) while insisting that there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually quite flexible: the financial resources that human institutions manufacture.

Public support must be husbanded as a finite national resource. It must be spent wisely, sparingly, and with the greatest return on your investment.

Your talent and abilities are limited resources. Your time is finite. If you don’t make your life about what you say yes to, then it will almost certainly become what you intended to say no to.

The paradox of life lies exactly in this: its resources are finite, but it itself is endless. Such a contradictory state of affairs is feasible only because the resources accessible to life can be used over and over again.

I followed many conversations about what happened in Norway and the death of Amy Winehouse because they happened one after the next. Too many of those conversations tried to conflate the two events, tried to create some kind of hierarchy of tragedy, grief, call, response. There was so much judgment, so much interrogation of grief—how dare we mourn a singer, an entertainer, a girl-woman who struggled with addiction, as if the life of an addict is somehow less worthy a life, as if we are not entitled to mourn unless the tragedy happens to the right kind of people. How dare we mourn a singer when across an ocean seventy-seven people are dead? We are asked these questions as if we only have the capacity to mourn one tragedy at a time, as if we must measure the depth and reach of a tragedy before deciding how to respond, as if compassion and kindness are finite resources we must use sparingly. We cannot put these two tragedies on a chart and connect them with a straight line. We cannot understand these tragedies neatly.

Productivity is effectively stewarding your gifts, talents, time, energy, and enthusiasm for the good of others and the glory of God. You have limited amounts of gifting, talents, time, energy, and enthusiasm, but unlimited ways of allocating them. For this reason productivity involves making decisions about how to allocate these finite resources.

Thank you," he said. "Welcome. Welcome especially to Mr. Coyle Mathis and the other men and women of Forster Hollow who are going to be employed at this rather strikingly energy-inefficient plant. It's a long way from Forster Hollow, isn't it?" "So, yes, welcome," he said. "Welcome to the middle class! That's what I want to say. Although, quickly, before I go any further, I also want to say to Mr. Mathis here in the front row: I know you don't like me. And I don't like you. But, you know, back when you were refusing to have anything to do with us, I respected that. I didn't like it, but I had respect for your position. For your independence. You see, because I actually came from a place a little bit like Forster Hollow myself, before I joined the middle class. And, now you're middle-class, too, and I want to welcome you all, because it's a wonderful thing, our American middle class. It's the mainstay of economies all around the globe!" "And now that you've got these jobs at this body-armor plant," he continued, "You're going to be able to participate in those economies. You, too, can help denude every last scrap of native habitat in Asia, Africa, and South America! You, too, can buy six-foot-wide plasma TV screens that consume unbelievable amounts of energy, even when they're not turned on! But that's OK, because that's why we threw you out of your homes in the first places, so we could strip-mine your ancestral hills and feed the coal-fired generators that are the number-one cause of global warming and other excellent things like acid rain. It's a perfect world, isn't it? It's a perfect system, because as long as you've got your six-foot-wide plasma TV, and the electricity to run it, you don't have to think about any of the ugly consequences. You can watch Survivor: Indonesia till there's no more Indonesia!" "Just quickly, here," he continued, "because I want to keep my remarks brief. Just a few more remarks about this perfect world. I want to mention those big new eight-miles-per-gallon vehicles you're going to be able to buy and drive as much as you want, now that you've joined me as a member of the middle class. The reason this country needs so much body armor is that certain people in certain parts of the world don't want us stealing all their oil to run your vehicles. And so the more you drive your vehicles, the more secure your jobs at this body-armor plant are going to be! Isn't that perfect?" "Just a couple more things!" Walter cried, wresting the mike from its holder and dancing away with it. "I want to welcome you all to working for one of the most corrupt and savage corporations in the world! Do you hear me? LBI doesn't give a shit about your sons and daughters bleeding in Iraq, as long as they get their thousand-percent profit! I know this for a fact! I have the facts to prove it! That's part of the perfect middle-class world you're joining! Now that you're working for LBI, you can finally make enough money to keep your kids from joining the Army and dying in LBI's broken-down trucks and shoddy body armor!" The mike had gone dead, and Walter skittered backwards, away from the mob that was forming. "And MEANWHILE," he shouted, "WE ARE ADDING THIRTEEN MILLION HUMAN BEINGS TO THE POPULATION EVERY MONTH! THIRTEEN MILLION MORE PEOPLE TO KILL EACH OTHER IN COMPETITION OVER FINITE RESOURCES! AND WIPE OUT EVERY OTHER LIVING THING ALONG THE WAY! IT IS A PERFECT FUCKING WORLD AS LONG AS YOU DON'T COUNT EVERY OTHER SPECIES IN IT! WE ARE A CANCER ON THE PLANT! A CANCER ON THE PLANET!

Any system of ethics must account for scarcity. If it doesn’t, humanity would perish due to misallocation of finite resources, including one’s own body.

the central fact of our existence is that time is the ultimate finite resource, but the remembering self ignores that reality

Days are a finite resource and it's best to protect the ones you have.

There are consequences for treating forgiveness like a rare and finite resource.

People who did not see willpower as a finite resource did not show signs of ego depletion.

But moral attention is not a finite resource.

Equity is not a finite resource. Especially when we understand it as love.

the years are slippery—coming, going, gone. Future is a finite resource.

Since human needs are finite, but human greed is not, economic growth can usually be maintained through artificial creation of needs by means of advertising. The goods that are produced and sold in this way are often unneeded, and thus are essentially waste. The pollution and depletion of natural resources generated by this enormous waste of unnecessary goods is exacerbated by the waste of energy and materials in inefficient production processes. Indeed, as we discuss in Chapter 17, the

In totalitarian regimes—communism, fascism, religious fundamentalism—popular support is a given. You can start wars, you can prolong them, you can put anyone in uniform for any length of time without ever having to worry about the slightest political backlash. In a democracy, the polar opposite is true. Public support must be husbanded as a finite national resource. It must be spent wisely, sparingly, and with the greatest return on your investment. America is especially sensitive to war weariness, and nothing brings on a backlash like the perception of defeat. I say “perception” because America is a very all-or-nothing society. We like the big win, the touchdown, the knockout in the first round. We like to know, and for everyone else to know, that our victory wasn’t only uncontested, it was positively devastating.

Smart people, like himself, who had acquired money and power weren’t nice because they had learned that caring about and helping others made them exposed and vulnerable, which led to failure. One had to look out for number one to get “the money” and “the power” the cabbie spoke of. Dale knew that money and power were finite. They were limited resources you couldn’t simply spread around the world for everyone to enjoy. Crafty, competitive people knew this and fought hard to get their share of it. People like the cabbie were naïve enough to think everyone would be happy sharing an equal amount of the pie. They lived in a fantasy world that socialism and communism touted. If the pie had been equally divided to everyone in the world, each person would hold a tiny sliver after the distribution was complete. Then everyone would be miserable and all those naïve people who had fought to make it happen would finally learn what they already knew—life was miserable with only a sliver of the pie. Of course the cabbie had suicidal thoughts and dreamed about shit towers piling high up into the sky; he was one of the caring people who had tried so hard to become another tile on the floor under the feet of cunning people, like himself, who were moving toward success by walking upon the altruistic pathway naïve people had constructed out of themselves. And that was more than fine with Dale. The greater number of people who thought like the cabbie the better, because it made it easier for people like himself to snatch up a bigger piece of the pie.

Driven living makes us the center of our well-planned schedules. It may stem from a passion to live with eternal purpose, but it signifies that we believe God’s work depends on us and neglects to acknowledge that God created us as finite resources dependent upon Him.

That's one of the things my dad taught me-that one of the most respectful things you can do for another person is be on time. 'Cause what's more valuable than one single minute in a human being's life? Time is finite, he used to say, the most precious and limited resource.

Love is like sunlight,” she said when I didn’t respond. “You can give all of yourself to someone and still have all of yourself left to give to others, and to yourself. To your work. To anything or anyone you choose. Love isn’t like food; you won’t starve anyone by giving it freely. It’s not a finite resource.

Death is a tragedy whether it is the death of one girl-woman in London or seventy-seven men, women, and children in Norway. We know this, but perhaps it needs to be said over and over again so we do not forget. I have never considered compassion a finite resource. I would not want to live in a world where such was the case.

I THINK IT IS POSSIBLE to track the onset of middle age exactly. It is the moment when you examine your life and instead of a field of possibility opening out, an increase in scope, you have a sense of waking from sleep or being washed up onshore, newly conscious of your surroundings. So this is where I am, you say to yourself. This is what I have become. It is when you first understand that your condition—physically, intellectually, socially, financially—is not absolutely mutable, that what has already happened will, to a great extent, determine the rest of the story. What you have done cannot be undone, and much of what you have been putting off for “later” will never get done at all. In short, your time is a finite and dwindling resource. From this moment on, whatever you are doing, whatever joy or intensity or whirl of pleasure you may experience, you will never shake the almost-imperceptible sensation that you are traveling on a gentle downward slope into darkness.

Over the years I have read many, many books about the future, my ‘we’re all doomed’ books, as Connie liked to call them. ‘All the books you read are either about how grim the past was or how gruesome the future will be. It might not be that way, Douglas. Things might turn out all right.’ But these were well-researched, plausible studies, their conclusions highly persuasive, and I could become quite voluble on the subject. Take, for instance, the fate of the middle-class, into which Albie and I were born and to which Connie now belongs, albeit with some protest. In book after book I read that the middle-class are doomed. Globalisation and technology have already cut a swathe through previously secure professions, and 3D printing technology will soon wipe out the last of the manufacturing industries. The internet won’t replace those jobs, and what place for the middle-classes if twelve people can run a giant corporation? I’m no communist firebrand, but even the most rabid free-marketeer would concede that market-forces capitalism, instead of spreading wealth and security throughout the population, has grotesquely magnified the gulf between rich and poor, forcing a global workforce into dangerous, unregulated, insecure low-paid labour while rewarding only a tiny elite of businessmen and technocrats. So-called ‘secure’ professions seem less and less so; first it was the miners and the ship- and steel-workers, soon it will be the bank clerks, the librarians, the teachers, the shop-owners, the supermarket check-out staff. The scientists might survive if it’s the right type of science, but where do all the taxi-drivers in the world go when the taxis drive themselves? How do they feed their children or heat their homes and what happens when frustration turns to anger? Throw in terrorism, the seemingly insoluble problem of religious fundamentalism, the rise of the extreme right-wing, under-employed youth and the under-pensioned elderly, fragile and corrupt banking systems, the inadequacy of the health and care systems to cope with vast numbers of the sick and old, the environmental repercussions of unprecedented factory-farming, the battle for finite resources of food, water, gas and oil, the changing course of the Gulf Stream, destruction of the biosphere and the statistical probability of a global pandemic, and there really is no reason why anyone should sleep soundly ever again. By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, overcrowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to barely be remarked upon. Meanwhile, in literally gilded towers miles above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepreneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept cocktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.

In a 2007 cable about Nauru, made public by WikiLeaks, an unnamed U.S. official summed up his government’s analysis of what went wrong on the island: “Nauru simply spent extravagantly, never worrying about tomorrow.” Fair enough, but that diagnosis is hardly unique to Nauru; our entire culture is extravagantly drawing down finite resources, never worrying about tomorrow. For a couple of hundred years we have been telling ourselves that we can dig the midnight black remains of other life forms out of the bowels of the earth, burn them in massive quantities, and that the airborne particles and gases released into the atmosphere - because we can’t see them - will have no effect whatsoever. Or if they do, we humans, brilliant as we are, will just invent our way out of whatever mess we have made. And we tell ourselves all kinds of similarly implausible no-consequences stories all the time, about how we can ravage the world and suffer no adverse effects. Indeed we are always surprised when it works out otherwise. We extract and do not replenish and wonder why the fish have disappeared and the soil requires ever more “inputs” (like phosphate) to stay fertile. We occupy countries and arm their militias and then wonder why they hate us. We drive down wages, ship jobs overseas, destroy worker protections, hollow out local economies, then wonder why people can’t afford to shop as much as they used to. We offer those failed shoppers subprime mortgages instead of steady jobs and then wonder why no one foresaw that a system built on bad debts would collapse. At every stage our actions are marked by a lack of respect for the powers we are unleashing - a certainty, or at least a hope, that the nature we have turned to garbage, and the people we have treated like garbage, will not come back to haunt us.

Ecologists recognized that resources are finite, and that nature is in charge. That's basic science. Capitalists believe that nature exists to be exploited by humans, a tenet perfectly in tune with Western religion.

[Trump] is also the personification of the merger of humans and corporations—a one man megabrand, whose wife and children are spin-off brands, with all the pathologies and conflicts of interest inherent in that. He is the embodiment of the belief that money and power provide license to impose one's will on others, whether that entitlement is expressed by grabbing women or grabbing the finite resources from a planet on the cusp of catastrophic warming. He is the product of a business culture that fetishizes "disruptors" who make their fortunes by flagrantly ignoring both laws and regularity standards. Most of all, he is the incarnation of a still-powerful free-market ideological project—one embraced by centrist parties as well as conservative ones—that wages war on everything public and commonly held, and imagines corporate CEOs and superheroes who will save humanity.

The confusion of inequality with poverty comes straight out of the lump fallacy—the mindset in which wealth is a finite resource, like an antelope carcass, which has to be divvied up in zero-sum fashion, so that if some people end up with more, others must have less. As we just saw, wealth is not like that: since the Industrial Revolution, it has expanded exponentially.7 That means that when the rich get richer, the poor can get richer, too.

All living organisms deal with the inescapable fact that energy and time are limited resources. Individuals must live within finite budgets -themselves earned through expenditures of time and energy- and can never spend more than they have available.

Since a flourishing society will vigorously exploit its natural resources, it will produce correspondingly great quantities of trash, and quickly its uninhabited lands will overflow with waste, threatening to make the society's own habitation into a wasteland.

as we have seen – we conceive God as infinite personal will and intelligence, as the exercise of infinite resource fully and eternally present in every moment of its action, there exists in creation the possibility of relation between finite and infinite at a level other than that of universal causal activation. Personal relatedness between divine and human will unites divine life with the highest of the levels of finite agency; and this relation transformingly illuminates how human intelligence and love are rooted in infinite agency.

Unfortunately, Doug, we have lost the long-term perspective, and we are suffering from an absurd and very unwise belief that there can be unlimited economic development on a planet of finite natural resources, focusing on short-term results or profits at the expense of long-term interests.

We have just enough time and money to compare ourselves to others who have more time and money, and we think we should be able to accomplish everything they do and have, without being able to see the sacrifices others have made to have the things they do. We grew up learning we could do anything we put our minds to, but the reality is that you just can’t have it all. So when we fail to live up to our own expectations, we think it is because of a problem within us instead of recognizing the very real limitations that come with having finite resources of time, money, and talent.

It’s tough to change friends, and it’s even tougher to admit when a friendship has run its course, but it can be an important part of growth, too. Friends come and go and, when you change, oftentimes the things you have in common are no longer in alignment, especially if those things are of a time-wasting or unhealthy nature. We have a finite amount of time—the most valuable resource on this planet—and you have 100 percent control over how that time gets spent. Surround yourself with people who want you to be better, and you will see yourself start to level up faster than ever before.

For most of human history, when you were born you inherited an off-the-shelf package of religious and cultural constraints. This was a kind of library of limits that was embedded in your social and physical environment. These limits performed certain self-regulatory tasks for you so you didn’t have to take them on yourself. The packages included habits, practices, rituals, social conventions, moral codes, and a myriad of other constraints that had typically evolved over many centuries, if not millennia, to reliably guide – or shall we say design – our lives in the direction of particular values, and to help us give attention to the things that matter most. In the twentieth century the rise of secularism and modernism in the West occasioned the collapse – if not the jettisoning – of many of these off-the-shelf packages of constraints in the cause of the liberation of the individual. In many cases, this rejection occurred on the basis of philosophical or cosmological disagreements with the old packages. This has, of course, had many great benefits. Yet by rejecting entire packages of constraint, we’ve also rejected those constraints that were actually useful for our purposes. “The left’s project of liberation,” writes the American philosopher Matthew Crawford, “led us to dismantle inherited cultural jigs that once imposed a certain coherence (for better and worse) on individual lives. This created a vacuum of cultural authority that has been filled, opportunistically, with attentional landscapes that get installed by whatever ‘choice architect’ brings the most energy to the task – usually because it sees the profit potential.” The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, in his book You Must Change Your Life, has called for a reclamation of this particular aspect of religion – its habits and practices – which he calls “anthropotechnics.”6 When you dismantle existing boundaries in your environment, it frees you from their limitations, but it requires you to bring your own boundaries where you didn’t have to before. Sometimes, taking on this additional self-regulatory burden is totally worth it. Other times, though, the cost is too high. According to the so-called “ego-depletion” hypothesis, our self-control, our willpower, is a finite resource.7 So when the self-regulatory cost of bringing your own boundaries is high enough, it takes away willpower that could have been spent on something else.

Do you believe human beings are using resources faster than the world can replace them?” The question seems so far beyond calculation it’s meaningless. Then some small jam in him dislodges, and it’s like an unblinding. “Yes.” “Thank you!” She’s pleased with her overgrown pupil. He grins back. Maidenhair’s head bobs forward and her eyebrows flare. “And would you say that the rate is falling or rising?” He has seen the graphs. Everyone has. Ignition has only just started. “It’s so simple,” she says. “So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don’t see it. So the authority of people is bankrupt.

Since machinery requires force from without, its use always requires a search for consumable power. When we think of nature as resource, it is as a resource for power. As we preoccupy ourselves with machinery, nature is increasingly thought of as a reservoir of needed substances. It is a quantity of materials that exist to be consumed, chiefly in our machines.

Sustainable growth, a phrase beloved by politicians, is an oxymoron. In a world of finite size, with limited resources, sustained growth of any material thing, such as a population or an economy, is not possible. Physical objects or processes cannot grow forever in a finite world. Understanding this simple fact is central to any understanding of sustainability.

Not to mention the fact that the belief in conspiracy theories is already a form of conspiracy theory in itself. It's to me not quite clear on what basis you would assume that one conspiracy is no conspiracy, and the others are. Capitalism drives on conspiracy theories as well: they believe in a certain power that creates a "free market" and that you can sit and grow forever on finite resources. This newspaper article obviously did not mean 'conspiracy theory' but 'urban legend', because the question if there are ufos landing on earth and whether you want to believe this seems to have little to do with conspiracy. And whether that is an urban legend worthy of belief is not undisputed. I think people who believe in such things are actually less illogical than people who believe housing associations are useful.

You have not done badly with electricity in a hundred years. And you did well with steam in quite a short time. But all that is so cumbersome, so inefficient. And your oil engines are just a deplorable perversion - dirty, noisy, poisonous, and the cars you drive with them are barbarous, dangerous… You should be employing your resources, while you still have the, to tap and develop the use of power which is not finite. ..I sometimes

Whether the result of wear, tear, and exhaustion of resources or whether genetically programmed, all life has a finite span and each species has its own particular longevity. For human beings, this would appear to be approximately 100 to 110 years. This means that even were it possible to prevent or cure every disease that carries people off before the ravages of senescence do, virtually no one would live beyond a century or a bit more.

Waste persons are those no longer useful as resources to a society for whatever reason, and have become apatrides, or noncitizens. Waste persons must be placed out of view-in ghettos, slums, reservations, camps, retirement villages, mass graves, remote territories, strategic hamlets-all places of desolation, and uninhabitable. We live in a century whose Master Players have created many millions of such "superfluous persons" (Rubenstein).

Discrimination -in the sense of sustaining a statistical predictive trait of an individual’s group to make a decision about the individual -is not always immoral, or at least we don't always treat it as immoral...Decisions that have to be made with finite time and resources, and which have high costs for certain kinds of errors, must use some trait as a basis for judging a person. And that necessarily judges the person according to a stereotype.

In one sense the cause of suicide is simple: overwhelming pain. This overwhelming pain, however, is the aggregate of thousands of pains. Any hurt that we have ever suffered, if it remains consciously or unconsciously lodged within us, can contribute to suicide. This may range from being an incest victim 50 years ago, to losing a job 10 years ago, to having a car battery stolen yesterday. The pains come from everywhere: ill-health, family, peers, school, work, community, caregivers. For each suicide there was a finite point at which this aggregate became too much. Although "The straw that broke the back," is frequently an accurate metaphor, no one pain is ever the cause of suicide. Suicidal pain is decomposable into thousands of pains, and nearly all of these pains are decomposable into painful constituents. Sexual abuse, job loss, and personal theft each have numerous painful constituents. The search for the single cause is a fundamentally wrongheaded approach to the understanding and prevention of suicide. It is inaccurate to say simply that pain causes suicide, since a level of pain that is lethal for one person may not be lethal for someone with greater resources. Similarly, deficiency in resources cannot be regarded as the cause of suicide, since two people may have equal resources and unequal pain. Our resources may also come from everywhere; even such trivial distractions as going to a movie can contribute to coping with suicidal pain.

the market economy is based on cyclical consumption and it really doesn’t matter what is being produced, how it is being produced, or why. If demand or production slows, so too does the movement of money, and when this happens, the economy contracts, systemically reducing the standard of living for many. Ecologically, this means capitalism is structurally oblivious to humanity’s existence on a finite planet. The system wants to produce, not conserve. In fact, if you think about it, you will discover an interesting paradox to market logic: the fact that capitalism is a scarcity-based economic system that actually seeks infinite consumption. In other words, it favors a threshold of goods scarcity to secure competitive profits, theorized as a model to properly manage scarcity, optimizing resource use and distribution. Yet, at the same time, the system demands more and more human dissatisfaction and “want” in order to function and grow. It rewards consumption, with no inherent incentive to conserve anything.

If collective action resulted in just one fewer devastating hurricane, just a few extra years of relative stability, it would be a goal worth pursuing. In fact, it would be worth pursuing even if it had no effect at all. To fail to conserve a finite resource when conservation measures are available, to needlessly add carbon to the atmosphere when we know very well what carbon is doing to it, is simply wrong. Although the actions of one individual have zero effect on the climate, this doesn't mean that they're meaningless. Each of us has an ethical choice to make. During the Protestant Reformation, when "end times" was merely an idea, not the horribly concrete thing it is today, a key doctrinal question was whether you should perform good works because it will get you into Heaven, or whether you should perform them simply because they're good--because, while Heaven is a question mark, you know that this world would be better if everyone performed them. I can respect the planet, and care about the people with whom I share it, without believing that it will save me.

Growing old is natural," growls the old woman. "When you’ve lived long enough for all your ambitions to be in ruins, friendships broken, lovers forgotten or divorced acrimoniously, what’s left to go on for? If you feel tired and old in spirit, you might as well be tired and old in body. Anyway, wanting to live forever is immoral. Think of all the resources you’re taking up that younger people need! Even uploads face a finite data storage limit after a time. It’s a monstrously egotistical statement, to say you intend to live forever. And if there’s one thing I believe in, it’s public service. Duty: the obligation to make way for the new. Duty and control.

No matter our age, education, or income, we share the same reality: none of us knows how much time we have left. One day, time runs out and tomorrow never comes. This is one of the core discoveries I’ve made researching time and money: we don’t understand well that time is our most valuable resource, and it is finite. Chasing money is valuable to a point, but it’s an infinite errand. You can always try to get more—and research shows people do that, no matter how much money they have already. Given how precious time is, we should put it first. But many of us focus on our careers, constantly giving up more of our time in exchange for more money or productivity.

Organic farming is environmentally friendlier to every acre of land. But it requires _more_ acres. The trade-off is a harsh one. Would we rather have pesticides on farmland and nitrogen runoffs from them? Or would we rather chop down more forest? How much more forest would we have to chop down? If we wanted to reduce pesticide use and nitrogen runoff by turning all of the world’s farmland to organic farming, we’d need about 50 percent more farmland than we have today. Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug, whose work helped triple crop yields over the last fifty years and arguably saved billions from starvation, estimates that the world would need an _additional_ 5 to 6 billion head of cattle to produce enough manure to fertilize that farmland. There are only an estimated 1.3 billion cattle on the planet today. Combined, we’d need to chop down roughly half of the world’s remaining forest to grow crops and to graze cattle that produce enough manure to fertilize those crops. Clearing that much land would produce around 500 billion tons of CO2, or almost as much as the total cumulative CO2 emissions of the world thus far. And the cattle needed to fertilize that land would produce far _more_ greenhouse gases, in the form of methane, than all of agriculture does today, possibly enough to equal all human greenhouse gases emitted from all sources today. That’s not a viable path.

We know that we are trapped within an economic system that has it backward; it behaves as if there is no end to what is actually finite (clean water, fossil fuels, and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions) while insisting that there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually quite flexible: the financial resources that human institutions manufacture, and that, if imagined differently, could build the kind of caring society we need. Anni Vassiliou, a youth worker who is part of the struggle against the Eldorado gold mine in Greece, describes this as living in “an upside down world. We are in danger of more and more floods. We are in danger of never, here in Greece, never experiencing spring and fall again. And they’re telling us that we are in danger of exiting the Euro. How crazy is that?

..how we seek to spend our time may depend on how much time we perceive ourselves to have. When you are young and healthy, you believe you will live forever. You do not worry about losing any of your capabilities. People tell you "the world is your oyster," "the sky is the limit," and so on. And you are willing to delay gratification-- to invest years, for example, in gaining skills and resources for a brighter future. You seek to plug into bigger streams of knowledge and information. You widen your networks of friends and connections, instead of hanging out with your mother. When horizons are measured in decades, which might as well be infinity to human beings, you most desire all that stuff at the top of Maslow's pyramid-- achievement, creativity, and other attributes of "self-actualization." But as your horizons contract-- when you see the future ahead of you as finite and uncertain-- your focus shifts to the here and now, to everyday pleasures and the people closest to you.

The Christian narrative states that a maximally powerful, maximally good, all-knowing aseitic being consciously created everything, including man who short-circuited shortly after. This failure resulted in the immediate separation of all earthly things, including man, from the Creator: the Middle Eastern deity named, Yhwh. The objective of life, according to the Christian narrative, is to return to communion with Yhwh. Failure to do so in a finite space of time (a single lifetime of indeterminate duration and unequal resources) will result in Yhwh tossing the individual into an abyss he created for his finest and most beautiful creation, an angel named Lucifer (Ezekiel 28:12,13), who also short-circuited sometime earlier. This is considered by Christians to be the ultimate punishment: an eternal separation from the god, Yhwh. This narrative is wholesale nonsense. As a theology (and scaffolding for a tremendously flawed accompanying theodicy), it is an extravagant work of self-annihilating absurdity. As a maximally good, aseitic being, everything was once part of perfection. That’s what aseity means. There was no-thing that was not already perfect. To argue otherwise is to concede Yhwh was not, in fact, perfect. Creation, therefore, destroyed this eternal harmony, this purity, and by this fact alone, the act of Creation can only be called maximally evil. Creation separated things from the perfect goodness. Creation expelled goodness and cast it into a state of imperfection, and that is evil. In the second instance, as Lucifer—Yhwh’s most perfect creation—had already failed, which was itself inevitable, then that means Yhwh consciously flung man into an already corrupted Creation, and that, too, is evil.

far from being a closed, circular loop, the economy is an open system with constant inflows and outflows of matter and energy. The economy depends upon Earth as a source—extracting finite resources such as oil, clay, cobalt and copper, and harvesting renewable ones such as timber, crops, fish and fresh water. The economy likewise depends upon Earth as a sink for its wastes—such as greenhouse gas emissions, fertiliser run-off and throwaway plastics. Earth itself, however, is a closed system because almost no matter leaves or arrives on this planet: energy from the sun may flow through it, but materials can only cycle within it.

an ecologist named Garrett Hardin wrote an article titled, The Tragedy of the Commons. Hardin’s thesis was that individuals acting in their rational self-interest would use whatever resources are available to them, blithely ignoring the fact that any finite resource eventually runs out, which is disastrous for everyone, including themselves. To illustrate, Harden used the metaphor of the open pasture, the commons as he called it, to which herdsmen bring their cattle to feed. Understandably, the herdsmen seek to feed as many cattle as possible in order to maximize their income and improve their lives. Over time however, the effects of overgrazing take a progressive toll on the commons, eventually rendering it unusable for all herdsmen.

Variable reward is the third phase of the Hooked Model, and there are three types of variable rewards: the tribe, the hunt, and the self. Rewards of the tribe is the search for social rewards fueled by connectedness with other people. Rewards of the hunt is the search for material resources and information. Rewards of the self is the search for intrinsic rewards of mastery, competence, and completion. When our autonomy is threatened, we feel constrained by our lack of choices and often rebel against doing a behavior. Psychologists refer to this as reactance. Maintaining a sense of user autonomy and trust is a requirement for sustained engagement. Experiences with finite variability become increasingly predictable with use and lose their appeal over time. Experiences that maintain user interest by sustaining variability with use exhibit infinite variability. Variable rewards must satisfy users’ needs while leaving them wanting to reengage with the product. DO

There is an infinite amount of suffering in the world. There is a distinctly finite amount of resources to deal with it. How do we decide who gets what? The dilemmas are agonizing. One man’s treatment is another man’s denial of treatment. To save X is to condemn Y.

What happens when unlimited demand meets finite resources? The answer is incredibly simple: rationing. That’s the path we would find ourselves on, and that path would lead, for the first time, to your grandchildren and their grandchildren having worse lives than you. That’s a bad path.

When a population of organisms grows in a finite environment, sooner or later it will encounter a resource limit. This phenomenon, described by ecologists as reaching the “carrying capacity” of the environment, applies to bacteria on a culture dish, to fruit flies in a jar of agar, and to buffalo on a prairie. It must also apply to man on this finite planet. JOHN P. HOLDREN and PAUL R. EHRLICH Global Ecology (1971) 1 Here is the difference between the animal and the man. Both the jay-hawk and the man eat chickens, but the more jay-hawks the fewer chickens, while the more men the more chickens. HENRY GEORGE

Population pressure can crowd the finite countryside and crunch resources. But demographic abundance is almost always a boon to the state. The state feeds on disposable bodies.

In a navy with infinite money and resources, pushing components to a hundred and ten percent of their normal operating ceilings was a good way to weed out those that might fail under the added duress of combat. In a navy with extremely finite quantities of both, that kind of limit-pushing was just begging for trouble.

Deadline after deadline, goal after goal, time races by, especially when we’re busy. Because our experience of time is so relative, it’s easy to forget that it’s a finite resource. Before we know it, we’re out of time.

Vital resources of energy and minerals are finite.

Willpower and brain capacity. Most of us are confused about what willpower really is. We tend to think some people have it in spades and that others like those with chemical and behavioral addictions are lacking in it. That's exactly how I saw myself as a person with no self-control or willpower which was not at all true. While impulse control was indeed a skill I had to hone. For instance through meditation, and mindfulness - staying present with feelings and reactions. Willpower, as in repression or inhibiting a desire. It isn’t a skill. It's a finite cognitive function known as inhibition. To understand a little bit more how willpower or inhibition works, a few pieces of information will help. First, willpower is one of five functions delegated to the prefrontal cortex or PFC. The other four functions are decision making, understanding, memorizing, and recalling. Second, it's important to know that the brain requires a crapload of energy from the body. It accounts for about 2% of our body mass and consumes about 20% of our energy. Most of our brain functions are automatic and don't require conscious processing. Like the beating of your heart, or a habit like driving a car. These automatic processes don't burn up metabolic resources. The PFC on the other hand requires a massive amount of energy or glucose to work. The same way you need energy to run a mile you need energy to make decisions or memorize facts. And this energy is not inexhaustible. We wake up every day with only so much gas in our tank to fuel our PFC. And we burn through it fairly quickly. What this means for willpower is that 1) it's a finite resource with only so much of it available to us each day and 2) it's a resource shared with other functions. Every time you solve a problem, make a decision, memorize a fact, remember something, or try not to do something, like eat that second cookie, or check your Instagram for the 14th time, you are draining your willpower reserves. Trying harder doesn't work when you've got nothing left in you to feel the effort. The thing about the Pfc is that there's no way to give it more gas. So there's no way to increase your willpower, or decision making, understanding, memorizing or recall. What you can do is approach those five functions as if they are precious resources because they are and plan your day in a way that uses them carefully. By creating more automation or habits so that you aren't using your decision making and willpower as often.

But make no mistake, change is coming. Because that’s how the Infinite Game works. This finite system we have now will run itself dry of will and resources eventually. It always does.

The universe might be infinite, but our appetites for exploring it are finite, and so are our resources. Time is the most precious resource of all.

How will it work when everyone is exactly equal?” my mother wanted to know. “Is there enough, really, to go around?” I was appalled by this sentiment, so chauvinist, racist, survivalist. I railed at her about the capitalist racket, the smallness of her Depression-era mindset (“But I don’t have a mindset,” she protested. “I have questions”). She was a good sport about it, really, mild-mannered in the face of my patronizing. But she persisted: Wouldn’t there always be some way people sorted themselves? If it wasn’t race or gender or class, would it be intelligence? Physical strength? Blood type? Weren’t there always bound to be haves and have-nots on account of finite resources? The constraints of weather and geography, for instance? Who got the high ground with fertile soil versus who got the desert? I think she honestly wanted to discuss this, but to me she sounded like a social Darwinist. I could see things only in oppositional terms. Today I’d love to have this conversation with her. I have an answer: The process of working toward greater equality is the point. The medium is the message. The journey is the destination. Something like that. It’s the effort to make life more equal, more bearable for everyone, that counts. And if we don’t try, what are we left with? A lifetime of showing off our most selfish instincts, protecting our own little slice of whatever it is we want—power, money, resources, the best seats on the bus. Life may be filled with struggle but what you struggle for is what matters. And if it’s only your own survival, you’re no better than the dinosaurs.

There is always someone whose suffering is greater than yours. The reproaches are often framed as though there is an economy of suffering, and of compassion, and you should measure yourself, price yourself, with the same sense of scarcity and finite resources that govern monetary economies, but there is no measure of either.

Can growth be sustained into the indefinite future? We first briefly address the general worry that since the world’s resources are finite, growth must be unsustainable in the very long term. If all resources were non-renewable, all economic activity, whether growing or static in magnitude, might eventually become unsustainable. But even this is not quite certain since a finite stock of non-renewable resources can last infinitely if the usage declines asymptotically over time—a not impossible achievement in a technologically dynamic society with a constant population. Fortunately, many resources are not of the non-renewable type. Furthermore, the law of conservation of mass energy shows that one does not destroy mass energy but merely transforms it into other forms. Also, the world is not a closed system, receiving a continuous flow of new energy from the sun. So there seems little substance in the general worry that over many centuries all forms of growth are unsustainable because of ultimate resource limitations.

theory of shareholder primacy that is at the heart of so much finite-minded business practice today. “In a free-enterprise, private-property system,” he wrote, “a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.” Indeed, Friedman insisted that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business, to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.

Obviously, under primitive planetary conditions — finite space and finite resources — the illth was perceived as necessary to protect the wealth. Territorial politics are much the same among domesticated primates as among other mammals; the primates are just smarter at building more omni-lethal weapons faster. This was originally a survival trait, an Evolutionary Relative Success, because primates are born without the physiological, inbuilt weaponry (lethal teeth, claws, horns etc.) of other mammals.

National Security, in practice, must always fall short of the logically Empedoclean infinite regress it requires for perfect “security.” In that gap between the ideal of “One Nation under surveillance with wire taps and urine tests for all,” and the strictly limited real situation of finite resources and finite funding, there is ample encouragement for paranoias of all sorts to flourish, both among the citizens and among the police.

Willpower is a finite resource. The way to overcome difficult situations isn't to power through, but rather to change your circumstances to require less willpower. Changing the context of the meeting to "looking for advisors" is the equivalent of throwing out all your chocolate when you start a diet. You change the environment to naturally facilitate your goals.

Love is not a finite resource, something you have to mete out carefully like a package of Oreos. Instead, providing love begets more love, which begets more and more love. To my friends: Even in my loneliest, most painful moments, it was your love that shone through the dark. Your love kept me alive. Your love raised me. When I let your love in, it made me better. It taught me how to slowly become kinder and gentler, and then, as love tends to do, it multiplied and blossomed and taught me how to love myself, and how to love others.

Providing things for free provides value insofar as it prevents further consumption of finite resources and maximizes the use of our productive efforts.

Life is a finite resource.

Renewable resources are flow-limited. They can support extraction or harvest indefinitely, but only at a finite flow rate equal to their regeneration rate. If they are extracted faster than they regenerate, they may eventually be driven below a critical threshold and become, for all practical purposes, nonrenewable.

We have only a finite number of resources to draw from each day, so why waste your energy on uncontrollable events?

Moral attention is not a finite resource.

Some might respond to the last point by claiming that, despite the obviously finite magnitude of both the human and nonhuman resources used by government forces, national defense nevertheless does represent equal protection for all in the sense that there is a perpetual commitment to resist aggression against any part of the nation. But that is false, and the American Civil War is clear evidence of this error in reasoning. Union forces would have done nothing to protect the Confederate states if, say, the government of France had attacked them. Instead, the French would have been viewed as allies in the subjugation of the Southern "traitors.” Intervention from abroad would only have been resisted by the North if it was accompanied by a demand that the Southern states, once defeated, would become a possession of that foreign power. And one cannot escape by claiming that the Confederacy was viewed as a separate nation and therefore was not owed protection. The North consistently maintained that the Confederacy was an unlawful entity along the lines of a criminal gang, not a sovereign nation. In short, governmental protection against aggression is never guaranteed, but instead may change with political conditions. In no sense, then, does national defense necessarily imply equal protection for all areas and all persons. True defense, though its effects may be widespread, is microeconomic in nature.

The problem for Rome was that its gold and silver reserves were finite; while the products that the Romans sought in eastern markets were renewable resources for the regimes that controlled production.