Modern society

Helping Auntie Cross the Road

There’s a moment that happens thousands of times a day and gets counted exactly

nowhere: someone stops what they’re doing to help an elderly woman cross a busy road.

She doesn’t fall. She doesn’t end up in A&E with a hip fracture. She gets home fine, and the

next morning she’s back doing what she always does — looking after her daughter’s kids, so

her daughter can go to work, so those kids grow up a bit more secure, a bit more looked

after, a bit more able to become capable adults themselves.

None of that shows up on a balance sheet. No invoice gets raised. No line appears in GDP.

But it’s real. Arguably it’s one of the most consequential five minutes of that day.

Now picture the alternative. Someone’s at their desk at 9pm, still answering emails, because

there’s a supplier negotiation to close and closing it a day early saves the company a bit of

money. They get praised for it. Maybe there’s a bonus at the end of the quarter. LinkedIn

calls this “hustle.” The org chart calls it “high performer.” Nobody in that meeting is thinking

about auntie.

Here’s the uncomfortable part: by any measure our economy actually uses, the second

person achieved more than the first. The email answerer is legible to the system — priced,

invoiced, attributable, promotable. The person who helped auntie is invisible to it, even

though the chain of consequences they set off (she’s safe, she can still care for her

grandkids, her daughter can still work, those kids get raised properly) is arguably the more

important outcome for the world.

What gets priced isn’t what has value

This isn’t a new observation dressed up in outrage — economists have been saying versions

of this for decades. GDP famously doesn’t capture unpaid care work, community labour, or

informal support networks, even though everyone quietly agrees those things are what hold

everything else up. Markets are extremely good at rewarding what’s scarce, individually

attributable, and transactional. They’re structurally blind to what’s abundant, collectively

produced, and — this is the important bit — deliberately non-transactional. The second you

tried to charge auntie for the favour, it would stop being the thing that made it valuable in

the first place.

So we’ve built a system that’s excellent at measuring the email and completely unable to

see the road crossing. And then we act surprised that the culture built on top of that system

rewards the wrong things.This isn’t really about laziness or selfishness

It would be easy to read this as “people today just don’t care about their communities

anymore.” That’s not quite it, and it’s not fair. It’s not that people have gotten worse — it’s

that the incentive structure has gotten better at hiding what actually matters. When the

thing that gets you promoted is legible, transactional output, and the thing that doesn’t is

quiet, unpaid care, you don’t need people to be selfish for the second thing to slowly get

squeezed out. You just need a system that never learned to see it.

That’s a bleaker diagnosis in some ways than “people are just selfish” — but it’s a more

useful one, because it points at something that can actually be changed: incentives and

culture, not human nature.

The tribal instinct underneath it

There’s a deeper layer to this too. A lot of what stops us from helping “auntie” in the first

place — especially if she’s not from your crew, your street, your background — is something

much older than capitalism. In-group and out-group bias is ancient, evolutionarily deep, and

well documented. We’re wired, at some baseline level, to be wary of people who don’t share

our group, our habits, the way they take their tea.

But that’s only half the wiring. Cooperation, reciprocity, and care for people outside the

immediate circle are just as evolved — they’re just quieter. Less dramatic. They don’t show

up as headlines the way tribal conflict does. Both instincts are in us. Which one a society

chooses to build its incentive structures around isn’t fixed by biology. It’s a choice.

What actually gets remembered

Nobody’s dying regret is an unanswered 9pm email. That’s not a naive sentiment — it’s just

correctly weighted priorities, arrived at the honest way, usually too late to change much.

Until we start rewarding the version of achievement that actually holds a society together —

the quiet, unpriced, cross-the-road kind — we’ll keep optimising for the wrong column on

the spreadsheet. And we’ll keep being mildly astonished that the community fabric feels

thinner every year, as if that were a mystery rather than a design outcome.

It isn’t atoms that make a life worth something in the end. It’s whether you helped auntie

cross the road, even when she wasn’t from your cre