Terminal Velocity

📷: detikFood

I’ve always loved food, and right now, my favourite snack has to be karak.

For those unfamiliar, karak is a traditional Indonesian delicacy: a thin, crunchy rice cracker made from cooked rice that’s been dried and fried until golden. It’s simple, savoury, and wonderfully addictive.

📷: kompas.com

Whenever I have karak, I usually pair one piece with nasi pecel or gudangan (a classic Javanese dish with vegetables and peanut sauce). It’s so good that I often find myself tempted to order two. One never seems enough, surely two would taste even better, right?

But reality begs to differ.

Once I move on to the second piece, the pleasure fades. The first bite of the first karak is pure bliss, the perfect crunch, the subtle saltiness, that light texture that feels almost celebratory.

By the time I start the second, though, it feels dull, heavy, and almost forced. I don’t even want to finish it.

It turns out my “limit of enjoyment” for karak is exactly one piece. Beyond that, the experience loses its spark.

And oddly enough, this reminded me of a concept from physics: terminal velocity.

physics.stackexchange.com

In simple terms, terminal velocity is the maximum speed an object can reach when falling through a fluid (like air). When an object begins to fall, gravity pulls it downward, causing it to accelerate. But as it falls faster, air resistance pushes upward, opposing that motion. Eventually, these two forces, gravity and air resistance, balance out.

At that exact point, the object stops accelerating and continues falling at a constant speed.

That steady speed is called terminal velocity.

In my case, my snack had its own version of terminal velocity: one piece of karak.

That’s the perfect speed or rather, the perfect limit, for maximum enjoyment. Any more, and pleasure stops accelerating; it plateaus, even declines.

Later, I started thinking that maybe terminal velocity applies to bigger things too.

The next day, while chatting with some old friends, our conversation drifted (as it often does) to money and power, the endless movement of wealth at the top of the pyramid. We were talking about recent scandals and market shifts when I said, half-jokingly:

“Perhaps there’s a limit, a point where money stops solving problems.”

Beyond that threshold, all money can really do is cover problems, not fix them.

Especially when it isn’t guided by enough knowledge or ethics.

And when money loses its power to solve, what’s left that can?

Knowledge and ethics.

In The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch,  argues that knowledge can grow without limit and that most of our problems exist only because of gaps in knowledge.

Unlike wealth or pleasure, knowledge has no terminal velocity.

The more you pursue it, the more rewarding it becomes.

Karak, like many worldly pleasures, reminds me that some things do have limits.

Knowledge, on the other hand, is infinite.

Maybe terminal velocity exists to teach us one quiet truth: that peace and joy are found not in excess, but in knowing exactly when enough is enough.