In the town of Munhall, on the ridge above the steel mills of Pittsburgh in the 1970s, my grandparents kept a modest backyard garden in a working-class neighborhood. Like many of the people on Marigold Street, they grew tomatoes, peppers, green beans, and whatever else would take to the soil. They called it a “Victory Garden.”
The term came from World War II. During the war, Americans were encouraged to grow their own vegetables to reduce pressure on the domestic food system. If enough households participated, the collective effort eased rationing and freed resources for the war effort.
By the time I was standing in front of my grandparents’ Victory Garden in the mid-1970s, the war had been over for decades. There was no rationing in the United States, no coordinated campaign, and no direct incentive for anyone in Munhall to keep using the name. And yet the Victory Gardens persisted—like a fossil from an earlier age.
What remained wasn’t the original purpose, but the logic behind it.
Victory Gardens only made sense at scale. One garden didn’t conserve resources. A single street of gardens didn’t either. Even all of Pittsburgh wouldn’t have moved the needle. But multiplied across millions of households, the behavior mattered. The essential feature wasn’t discipline or moral virtue. It was the ability to imagine individual actions as part of an aggregate outcome.
In that sense, the Victory Garden was a systems artifact. It depended on a shared mental model—coordinated, but decentralized. No one garden needed to matter on its own for the system to work.
Napster was another systems artifact, but of a very different kind.
I first encountered peer-to-peer file sharing as a tech nerd in the mid-1990s. It reached the mainstream in 1999 with the release of Napster, a simple application that allowed users to share music directly with one another. Adoption spread quickly across college campuses, where students traded entire music libraries with almost no friction.
I’m not claiming any special foresight, but even then, the trajectory felt obvious. Once music became freely available at the individual level, payment would collapse at scale. Not because people were malicious, but because the system no longer required them to consider the aggregate outcome of their actions.
Despite being described as “peer-to-peer,” file sharing worked by removing peers from the equation. Participation was anonymous, automatic, and frictionless. The software handled coordination. Users didn’t need to imagine anyone else. They didn’t need to believe their participation mattered. The network absorbed responsibility by design.
Victory Gardens required people to picture millions of other households tending their own small plots. Napster worked because it required nothing beyond installing the software.
In the mid-2000s, after about a decade as a middle school teacher, I picked up a mantra. I didn’t invent it, and I don’t remember where I first heard it, but it became central to how I thought about behavior:
What if everyone did what you’re doing?
I didn’t use the question as a reprimand. It wasn’t part of a disciplinary script. I was drawn to it because it functioned as a systems diagnostic. It allowed students to pause and examine their actions without being cast as good or bad people. The focus wasn’t intent or character. It was outcome.
I once watched a student shove his way to the front of the lunch line. Instead of lecturing him, I asked what would happen if everyone did the same thing. He didn’t hesitate. He described a cafeteria full of students pushing and fighting, with no one getting fed. The conclusion wasn’t moral. It was logistical. The system couldn’t withstand the behavior once it was multiplied.
The same question worked in reverse. If I saw a student quietly helping another with a difficult assignment, I’d ask aloud what would happen if everyone helped without being asked. The extrapolation was just as clear. The behavior scaled in a way that strengthened the system rather than collapsing it.
The power of the question was that it didn’t tell students what to do. It showed them what would happen.
Humans aren’t any better or worse than they’ve ever been. So what changed?
At some point, we stopped running the thought experiment that made behavior intelligible at scale. We stopped asking what our actions would look like if they were widely copied, normalized, or automated.
This may be less a moral shift than a structural one. We now live inside systems that are fast, networked, and highly individualized. Communication is instantaneous. Coordination is handled invisibly. Algorithms narrow the world down to what already aligns with our preferences, reducing the need to imagine people outside our immediate frame.
In this environment, actions are evaluated primarily by intent. They’re understood as expressions of identity—signals of who we are—rather than as behaviors that might be replicated by millions of others. The question isn’t whether something scales well, but whether it feels authentic, convenient, or justified in the moment.
Aggregate consequence fades into the background. Replicability rarely enters the conversation. Most everyday choices are treated as neutral at the individual level, even when the same choice, repeated endlessly, reshapes the system itself. Very few people will think twice about overnight shipping or similar conveniences, not because they’re careless, but because the system is designed to make scale invisible.
When I was working as a book coach, I spent a lot of time thinking about why stories work at all. Across genres and formats, from knock-knock jokes to novels, the same basic structure kept showing up.
Conflict. Choice. Consequence.
A conflict disrupts the status quo. A choice is made in response. And that choice produces consequences that ripple outward, affecting more than just the person who made it.
I didn’t invent this structure. It’s been embedded in storytelling for as long as we’ve been telling stories. And it persists for a simple reason: stories without consequence don’t hold attention. Readers might not be able to articulate what’s missing, but they feel it immediately. Without consequence, nothing accumulates. Nothing matters.
This structure works because consequence propagates. A choice is never fully contained. It alters the conditions around it and changes what becomes possible next.
What’s striking is how intact this logic remains in fiction, even as it thins in real life. In the world outside stories, consequences are increasingly abstracted, delayed, or pushed somewhere else. They’re absorbed by systems, distributed across networks, or deferred far enough into the future that they’re difficult to recognize as consequences at all.
So what is this we’re living inside now? Hyper-individualism? Cognitive overload? An unsustainable pace that leaves no room for second-order thinking?
I’m not sure. It may not even matter which explanation we reach for. What feels more noticeable is what’s missing. We no longer pause to ask what happens when a behavior becomes common—when it’s repeated, normalized, and automated across millions of people.
Maybe collapse doesn’t announce itself with chaos or visible failure. Maybe it arrives more quietly. Not as disorder, but as omission. A question that fades from use. A thought experiment that no longer runs.
The behavior continues. The system adjusts. And whatever difference that question once made is absorbed, quietly, into the background.