The deficit is the symptom, but spending is the disease.
The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements (as well as one's deepest failures) is a definite symptom of maturity.
A lot of the messed-up stuff that men inflict on women is kind of a symptom of the messed-up stuff that they should be dealing with themselves.
Dementia is, after all, a symptom of organic brain damage. It is a condition, a disorder of the central nervous system, brought about in my case by a viral assault on brain tissue. When the assault wiped out certain intellectual processes, it also affected emotional processes.
Climate change is not a discrete issue; it's a symptom of larger problems. Fundamentally, our society as currently designed has no future. We're chewing up the planet so fast, in so many different ways, that we could solve the climate problem tomorrow and still find that environmental collapse is imminent.