Waste and Limited Resources

Space, time, and energy is about all we're given to work with. And of those, only energy do we have any power to moderate. Energy spent on one thing, necessarily can't be spent on anything else, it can only change forms. It's that natural balancing limit which is important.
As a quick example of what I mean, everyone knows jellyfish for their sting. They sting because they're predators and that's how they catch their food which keeps them alive. Some time ago, a group of jellies got separated from the environment that their ancestors had grown to, and were forced to adapt to their new surroundings or die. So over a few tens of thousands of generations fighting the constant uphill battle against large-scale death, they went from carnivorous predators, to vegetarian farmers in the absence of available food resources to which their species had previously adapted. This eyeless, brainless organism follows the sun for miles across the lake it lives in everyday to feed it's own internal garden of algae that it has adapted to feed on. These jellies don't sting, because they've lost their need to. Why not keep it anyway just in case? Because life never learned how to waste.
People on the other hand have mastered waste, that's why we think it's normal. We waste time, we waste space, we waste energy because we think it's unlimited. When you're sitting in front of the television, watching the real world with your brain on idle, not only are you wasting time, you're wasting mental energy (albeit very little). The very same mental energy that can be turned into paintings, or music, or a story, or an A paper, or the perfect rebuttal to that joke your social nemesis cut on you in class the other day. Sure you could do all of that later, but that doesn't mean the result is the same. That energy you spent zoning out absorbing nonsense from the television or whatever other source is gone. Forever. It ain't coming back. Sure you have enough of it over the course of your life to make up for it, but why do we even put ourselves in that hole?