Essays on Development & Education
EEF- Excess Energy And Frustration
For years I had a name for a feeling that I assumed was just mine.
I called it EEF: Excess Energy and Frustration.
It wasn’t anxiety. At least, it didn’t feel like anxiety.
It happened after days when I had done almost nothing. I’d spend hours sitting around watching movies or scrolling or simply existing without really moving my body. Eventually a strange sensation would arrive. My body felt like it was vibrating. Restless. Irritated. As if there were energy trapped inside me with nowhere to go.
The odd part was that I didn’t want to move.
Children Are Paying for Our Abstraction
Children Are Paying for Our Abstraction
We built systems optimized for speed, scale, and symbolic exchange — and then we handed them to children. This essay argues that the cost is not appearing in intelligence or academic performance but in something harder to measure: the capacity for integration. The ability to stay present in a body, tolerate discomfort, and develop a self through direct encounter with reality. Drawing on thirty years of teaching children through movement and the experience of raising children inside one of Massachusetts' lowest-performing districts, this is an argument that what we are witnessing is not failure — it is precise adaptation to environments built for scale rather than for becoming human.