Thermoeconomics, or the Birth of the Blog

When I took thermodynamics as a geology student at MIT, I knew I had found the key to the universe. It explained everything! I loved the fact that there was a word, an actual scientific term, derived from Greek, to describe why everything always goes to hell. Entropy explained much of what I saw around me -- including death. It explained why every one of my relationships ended and why albite crystals have so many planes of symmetry. What could it not explain?

I resolved that if I ever got rich, I would go back to MIT and just study thermodynamics, so that eventually I could understand everything. However, given that I majored in geology, and then went on to get a master’s degree in creative writing, getting rich was not a real possibility. So my thermodynamic education ended after one class, of which I remember almost nothing -- only the conviction that if I kept at it, I would eventually know all.

Thrust into the real world after four years, I had the brutal awakening of finding that no one wanted to hire a girl with a newly minted BS in geology, so I worked at a discount bookstore for $4.25 an hour and mooched off my boyfriend. I soon realized there was another force in the universe just as powerful as entropy – money. If I could only somehow meld economics and thermodynamics, I thought, then I would truly have the key, the Grand Unified Theory.

But this blog isn’t about that exactly. Since I never did go back for more thermo, and I never took an economics class, I speak, and write, in a different language. It is not that of heat loss or gross domestic product but rather of trees and ponds and jobs and Mattress City. This blog is about that thing that neither economists nor thermodynamicists can agree on – what is enough?

The word itself is easy to define – or at least to find synonyms for: sufficiency, satisfaction, accomplishment, success, abundance…. The Oxford English Dictionary gives much history and etymology of the word, but the most enlightening quote is from Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote in his French and Italian Journals, in 1858, “There is no enough short of a little too much.”

How is that even possible? If this quote is true, then “enough” is an Escher staircase, in which you climb higher to seek it but somehow end up on the ground floor again. You know you’ve gone right past it, and yet when you go even slower and look harder, you still can’t see it.

I have been wondering about this for a long time, but I am writing about it now because of a confluence of events – decorating a tree, losing weight unexpectedly, digging a pond, considering a new job, trying to get a fair union contract, watching the financial crisis unfold, experiencing climate change, receiving an inheritance, raising a curious child, fighting to keep art and music in her school, and many more things that I will be writing about in the weeks to come.

I plan to post at least once a week. Sunday midnight is my deadline. Some weeks there may be more posts, some weeks only one. But every week will bring a consideration of some aspect of “enough”. I look forward to reading your comments and questions, so we can have a conversation. I started this project because I wanted to know for myself, at a very personal level, what enough is. When can I stop working my ass off because I have enough? But while reading and writing my way through my own questions, I realized this is bigger than just me. Society, too, needs to find a satiation point before the earth itself has had enough of us.