The commons inside us

I used to think the tragedy of the commons was something that happened out there, in fisheries, forests and the climate system, but over the years I’ve realised I’ve lived through it too.

In startup life the commons is often our collective energy: everyone pushes harder and harder to get things done, but when the invisible resource of wellbeing gets depleted, the whole team suffers. I’ve burned out more than once in that cycle, not because I wanted to but because the system rewarded overwork in the short term.

I see the same dynamic in finance, where the system is designed to reward short-term returns even when they undermine the long-term health of companies, communities and the planet, so that everyone acts rationally for themselves while the collective outcome is destructive.

The tragedy of the commons isn’t inevitable; it’s a design choice.

That’s why I care so deeply about building alternatives, because if we can design systems that reward long-term stewardship over short-term extraction, we can shift the outcome from tragedy to regeneration.

Through a systems lens

Here I step back from the story to look at the system it belongs to, how the same pattern shows up elsewhere, and where it sits in the Coherence Framework.

A commons is anything a group depends on that no one person owns: a fishery, a forest or clean air, and just as much, the energy and goodwill of a team or the patience of a household. What makes it vulnerable is that each extra draw on it looks harmless on its own, and it’s only when they’re added together that it runs dry.

The same pattern appears at every scale. In a household, one person’s care becomes the resource everyone leans on until they collapse; in a startup, the team’s wellbeing is spent to hit the next milestone and then the one after that; and in finance, long-term health is traded for this quarter’s returns. Everyone is acting sensibly for themselves inside rules that reward the short term, and the collective outcome is one nobody would choose.

The pattern to notice is the gap between who benefits and who pays. The gains from overdrawing a commons arrive quickly and go to individuals, while the costs arrive slowly and are shared, which makes them easy to ignore until they become catastrophic. Burnout works in exactly this way, with the organisation taking the extra hours now and the person carrying the depletion later.

In the Coherence Framework this is a structure problem that shows up in state. The incentives reward extraction and the evidence arrives in nervous systems, first as tiredness and then as illness, and no amount of personal resilience can fix a commons that is being drained by design.

Communities can look after shared resources well when the people who depend on them make the rules together and share the work of care. That’s the hopeful part, because it means tragedy isn’t built into human nature at all but into particular rules, and rules can be rewritten.