Managing Energy or Managing Us? Spoon Theory and the Corporate Rebrand

Some ideas weren’t meant to be monetised. They were born in casual conversations between disabled people trying to survive a world that doesn’t make space for us. They were shared between friends, in blogs, in online community groups, in back corners of forums where people swapped strategies for making it through the day without collapsing. Spoon Theory was one of them.

In 2003, Christine Miserandino, a chronically ill woman living with lupus, wrote a blog post called ‘The Spoon Theory’. It was never meant to be a brand. It was a simple, elegant and powerful metaphor that was originally offered to a friend in a coffee shop. Christine grabbed a handful of spoons to explain what it’s like to live with limited energy. How every task, even brushing your teeth or answering an email, costs a spoon. Once you run out, you’re done. There’s no borrowing from tomorrow and no powering through. You’re out.

It resonated. Not just with people with chronic illness, but eventually with neurodivergent folks and others in disabled communities. People whose energy fluctuated based on factors that the outside world didn’t see, let alone accommodate. ‘I'm low on spoons’ became a shorthand in our communities. It wasn’t a complaint, but a boundary. A way to say ‘I’m at my limit, and I don’t owe you more than that’.

But as the language spread, it attracted the attention of those that saw a way to repackage it for their own purposes, and somewhere along the way, something shifted.

Today, Spoon Theory has been gutted, scrubbed, and recoded into something far more palatable to the corporate world. We see it repackaged as ‘energy banking’ or ‘energy accounting’ or ‘energy management’. Why the language of economics? Because our current moment demands that all experiences, even those of chronic illness and disability, be translated into quantifiable, manageable, and productive terms. Economic language offers a familiar, system approved vocabulary that aligns with ideas like efficiency, measurement, productivity, and self-regulation.

Spoon Theory is being lost. In its place are downloadable PDFs, webinars and CPD certified courses in how to become a ‘master’ at ‘energy banking’. Surprise surprise, most of these are not aimed at changing the structures that exhaust us, but at teaching disabled people how to better manage our exhaustion within ourselves.

That’s the logic of neoliberalism. Take a community created tool of survival, reframe it in economic terms, and sell it back to the people who made it.

That includes disabled people selling to other disabled people. Because the system coerces us into monetising our lives if we want to eat. There’s no ethical consumption in this model, but we also need to name what’s happening without pretending we can’t see it.

This is what happens when ideas born in care are absorbed by a culture obsessed with productivity. It’s not unique to Spoon Theory. It’s the gearing up of the neurodiversity industrial complex. A rapidly growing economy of training packages, neuro-inclusive audits, toolkits, and consultant led reform that too often centres neurotypical comfort and workplace efficiency over radical redesign. It rewards those who can translate grassroots knowledge into policy speak, while the original community sits at the edges, underpaid or entirely ignored.

It’s not just appropriation. It’s erasure.

When we rename Spoon Theory as ‘energy banking’ we’re not just updating the language, we’re abandoning its meaning. We’re pretending this was ever about efficiency. It wasn’t. It was about limits. About dignity and about the refusal to bend our bodies to fit a world that demands too much.

That refusal is political.

We have to fight to keep ownership of our ideas. Not in some trademark sense, but in the way we use them. We need to hold onto our language, our frameworks, and our grassroots ideas. We need to remember that these were never meant to be digestible to institutions. They were born to be useful to US.

There’s nothing wrong with sharing our metaphors, but we don’t have to let them be whitewashed into wellness buzzwords. We can resist the push to make everything palatable to the market. We can remind each other that not everything needs a downloadable workbook.

The real power of ideas like Spoon Theory isn’t in how many times they get rebranded. It’s in how they live in us and in how we use them to say NO.

We don’t owe anyone an invoice for that.