The commons inside us

I used to think of the tragedy of the commons as a problem of land and sea: the overgrazed village pasture the idea was first explained with, the cod stocks that collapsed off Newfoundland, forests cleared faster than they can grow back. Over time I’ve come to see it much closer to home, in the energy of the people inside our organisations.

A person’s energy behaves like a commons. Their attention, care, creativity and goodwill are drawn on by everyone around them, from the team and the organisation to the household and the people who rely on them. No single request looks like much: another meeting, one more deadline, a favour, a message that needs an answer tonight. Each is reasonable on its own, and nobody making the request is counting the total. When the energy runs out, the cost lands on the person, and the system that drew on them moves on to the next source.

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 is a design choice, which means it can be designed differently.

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 Wholeness Ledger.

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, the attention of a single person 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 team, people’s energy 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 Wholeness Ledger 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.

Elinor Ostrom, who won a Nobel prize for this work, showed that 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 the tragedy isn’t built into human nature but into rules, and rules can be rewritten. For a person’s energy, that might look like a team deciding together what it can carry, instead of leaving each individual to defend their own limits alone.