Waste, yet again

If you wear a shirt a lot, it may no longer be useful for, e.g., job interviews, but you’re not ipso facto wasting it are you?

You’d be wasting a good shirt if you bought a new one and let it get weathered on the scarecrow you have out back, guarding the tomatoes, but not if you just wore it a lot. So it can’t simply be the process of making the object less useful.

Yeah — for the reason Simon pointed out, I think there’s gotta be some kind of counterfactual or ideal element to the definition — something ceases to be useful faster than it would have under ordinary circumstances, or something ceases to be useful at the ordinary rate, but with less use given it than under ordinary circumstances.

I think that on your definition, when my horse dies while I am riding it, I have wasted my horse. But that is not necessarily or even generally true. There are special circumstances under which it may be true, such as when I use the last remaining strength of my horse for a pleasurable jaunt about the countryside instead of letting him rest for an important battle the next day.

More generally, your definition requires some metric of usefulness. When I use some amount of money to buy a bottle of wine instead of saving dozens of innocent children’s lives with a donation to Oxfam, have I wasted that money?

Has anyone seen the amazing and criminally overlooked book by Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia? One might find some useful stuff in there about waste (among many other things). It really is, btw, an incredibly deep and valuable text.