The Line is Longer Because We're In It

Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed the same pattern in conversation.

Someone mentions they just got back from a trip, and almost immediately, the question follows: How was TSA?

Not where they went. Not what they did. The line.

The answers are rarely neutral. People describe getting there hours earlier than usual, building in extra time just in case, adjusting their plans around what they assume the experience will be. 

By the time the next person heads to the airport, they’re not just responding to their own situation, but everything they’ve heard.

At TSA checkpoints across the country, that shared expectation is shaping behavior in real time.

On its surface, the disruption is easy to explain. A government shutdown delays paychecks. Some TSA agents, understandably, do not show up to work. Capacity drops, and the system slows. It is, in part, a funding issue.

But that explanation, while accurate, doesn’t fully account for what is unfolding. What follows is not just a logistical problem. It is a behavioral one.

Travelers begin arriving earlier than they normally would. Then earlier still. What was once a two-hour buffer becomes four, then five, then six. Each decision is reasonable on its own. No one wants to miss their flight. Everyone has somewhere important to be.

Yet as those individual decisions accumulate, they begin to reshape the system itself. 

People who would normally arrive at different times are now showing up all at once. This puts an even greater strain on a system that is already strained.

As they say, history has a way of repeating itself. During the 1979 oil crisis, fuel supply declined following disruptions tied to the Iranian Revolution. But the scale of the disruption alone doesn’t explain the lines that stretched for blocks. As reports of shortages spread, drivers began filling up more frequently, and often before they needed to. Gas stations introduced rationing systems based on license plate numbers, attempting to manage access. The result was a surge in demand driven not just by necessity, but by anticipation. The system strained under both constraint and response.

What is happening now reflects a similar dynamic. It aligns closely with what Peter Senge described as the “Tragedy of the Commons,” where individually rational actions, taken collectively, begin to erode the shared resource everyone depends on.

The instinct is to treat this purely as a technical problem. Restore funding, increase staffing, move people through faster. Those interventions matter, and they address part of the issue. But they do not fully explain what we are seeing.

Because underneath the operational strain is something much deeper: a shift in trust. Trust in the system to function. Trust in other people not to overwhelm it. When that trust weakens, behavior adjusts. People hedge. They overcorrect. They act earlier and more defensively, not out of malice, but out of uncertainty and self-preservation.

The result is a reinforcing loop. The more instability people perceive, the more their behavior contributes to it.