Every year, twice a year, we move the clocks. Daylight saving time. Everyone hates it. Doctors say it causes heart attacks. Economists say it costs billions. Every March and November, the smartest people on Twitter write threads explaining why it’s insane. Politicians promise to end it.
Nothing changes.
This is not a failure of intelligence. Everyone knows the system is broken. The problem is that no one can fix it alone. States can’t act without federal approval. Congress can’t agree on whether to stay on standard time or daylight time. The EU keeps voting to abolish it and then postponing. Everyone agrees. Nothing moves.
Welcome to collective stuckness.
The Traffic Problem
Here’s how it works.
Your job starts at 9am. So you leave your house at 7:30 to make it on time. Reasonable.
But everyone else’s job also starts at 9am. So everyone else also leaves at 7:30. Now there are a million cars on the road at the same time. Traffic. You’re stuck for an hour. You arrive stressed. You do this every single day.
No one wants this outcome. Every driver on that highway would prefer an empty road. But every driver is also causing the traffic they hate. And no single driver can fix it by leaving earlier or later, because everyone else is still leaving at 7:30.
This is collective stuckness: everyone agrees the outcome is bad, but no single person can change it alone.
The Pattern Repeats
Once you see this pattern, you start noticing it everywhere.
Healthcare enrollment. Every year, my insurance company sends a message: time to re-enroll. Nothing has changed. I didn’t move. I didn’t get a new job. I don’t need different coverage. But the system demands I click buttons and confirm things. If I don’t, I get penalized. So every year, millions of Americans spend hours re-enrolling in plans they already have. Everyone knows this is pointless. No one can stop doing it.
Tipping culture. The sub-minimum wage ($2.13/hour in many states) forces workers to depend on tips. Customers hate the guilt. Workers hate the instability. But employers benefit from shifting payroll to customers, and the law keeps it locked. Everyone’s trapped.
For more examples, see The List.
Why It Persists
Not all these problems are identical. Some you cause yourself, like traffic. Some you just suffer, like daylight saving. Some hit you today, like healthcare enrollment. Some hit your grandchildren, like climate change or falling birthrates.
But they share the same structure. The mechanics are clear.
First, the pain is distributed. Everyone suffers a little. No one suffers enough to revolt. Traffic wastes an hour of your day, but it doesn’t ruin your life. Healthcare enrollment is annoying, but you do it once a year. Daylight saving hurts twice a year, then we adapt and forget until next time. The costs are real but diffuse. No single person has enough incentive to fix the system.
Second, the responsibility is diffused. Who owns the traffic problem? The city? The employers? The drivers? Everyone and no one. When responsibility belongs to everyone, it belongs to no one. There’s no single throat to choke.
Third, someone benefits. Daylight saving time has lobbyists. The healthcare enrollment system employs thousands of people. Tipping lets employers shift payroll costs to customers. For every stuck system, there’s usually someone extracting value from the stuckness. They don’t want change.
Fourth, coordination is almost impossible. To fix traffic, every employer would need to stagger start times. To fix tipping, every restaurant would need to switch at once. These coordinated moves require trust that doesn’t exist. So everyone keeps defecting, and the bad equilibrium holds.
This is why people feel powerless. Not because they lack ideas. Because individual action is the wrong tool for collective problems.
The Wrong Approach
Most people who notice collective stuckness try to fix it by pushing. They write articles. Start petitions. Complain on social media. Try to convince everyone, one person at a time.
This almost never works.
The system is stuck because you cannot think your way out of a coordination trap. You cannot persuade your way out of misaligned incentives. Pushing harder on a locked door does not open it.
Architects of Leverage
The people who actually change stuck systems don’t push harder. They find the hinge.
An architect of leverage locates the point where small force creates large movement. Instead of coordinating millions directly, they build something that coordinates people automatically. They design around the system, not through it.
Consider traffic. No one solved traffic by convincing every employer to stagger start times. That would require impossible coordination. But Waze changed how millions of people choose their routes. It didn’t eliminate traffic, but it redistributed it. One app, built by a small team, shifted the behavior of entire cities. That’s leverage.
Consider taxis. For decades, the taxi medallion system was textbook collective stuckness. Everyone knew it was corrupt. Medallions cost a million dollars. Service was terrible. Nothing changed because the system protected itself. Then Uber appeared. It didn’t reform taxis. It made taxis irrelevant. It built a parallel system that bypassed the stuck one entirely. Within a few years, the medallion system collapsed. That’s leverage.
Consider banking. Starting a business used to require weeks of paperwork to accept payments. Banks moved slowly because they had no competition. Then Stripe built an API that let any developer accept payments with a few lines of code. It didn’t fix banks. It routed around them. That’s leverage.
The pattern is consistent. Architects of leverage don’t try to convince the system to change. They find the hinge point and apply pressure until the system moves.
How Change Actually Happens
Every lasting change traces back to a small committed group who decided something must change. It always starts with a handful of people.
The committed minority is the foundation. What varies is the tactic they use.
1. Build a parallel system. Don’t reform the broken thing. Replace it. Uber replaced taxis. Airbnb replaced hotels.
2. Create a tool that changes behavior. Waze redirected traffic. Google Maps changed how people navigate. A tool doesn’t require coordination. It just needs to be useful. Adoption changes behavior at scale.
3. Shift the narrative. Some systems change when the story changes. Smoking went from sophisticated to disgusting over fifty years. Therapy went from shameful to normal. When you change what people consider normal, you change what they’re willing to do.
4. Apply collective pressure. Strikes, boycotts, unions, political organizing. Force the system to respond through coordinated withholding or demand.
The first three tactics are permissionless. Anyone can attempt them. You build, you ship, you let adoption decide.
The fourth requires power, or access to power, or forcing your way into power. Unions need recognition. Boycotts need coordination. Political change needs influence over lawmakers.
This distinction matters. In environments where you can build without permission, tactics 1-3 can take you far. In environments where permission is forced on you through corruption, gatekeeping, or top-down control, even tactics 1-3 drag you into tactic 4. You must seek permission. You must know someone. You must pay someone.
The Progression
The committed minority picks a tactic. If it works, momentum builds. Then scaling happens: policy, regulation, mainstream adoption.
Smoking: A few researchers publish cancer links → lawyers take on tobacco → activists campaign → regulation follows → culture shifts. Fifty years. Started with a handful.
Civil rights: A few people sit at a lunch counter → movement builds → marches → legislation follows. Started with a handful.
The pattern holds. Small group → tactic → momentum → scaling → the norm.
The Shift in Thinking
The insight here is simple but important.
You cannot solve collective stuckness by being individually smarter. The trap is structural, so the solution must be structural.
But that doesn’t mean individuals are powerless. It means thinking differently about where to apply effort.
The question is not: how do I push harder against this broken system?
The question is: where is the hinge? What tool could I build, what narrative could I shift, what parallel system could I create?
When you see the world this way, collective stuckness stops being depressing. It becomes a map. Every stuck system is a puzzle. The systems broken longest are the ones with the most potential energy waiting to be released.
Traffic. Healthcare. Education. Housing. Finance. The legal system. These are not hopeless. They’re waiting.
Become an architect of leverage.
For the full inventory of stuck systems, see The List.
I’m exploring agency, systems, and how change actually happens.