We Are Living In A Crab Bucket. And We Put Ourselves There.

You know the theory. Put several crabs in a bucket together and none of them will climb out. Not because the bucket is too deep but because the moment one crab starts to climb, the others pull it back down.

Not out of malice or spite but out of desperation, fear, scarcity.

I've been watching the bucket. And we need to talk about it.

This Isn't About Crabs.

On social media one conversation keeps coming up: A parent asks whether it's reasonable to be able to book a seat next to their child on a flight without paying the seat selection fee. The response is usually an avalanche of fury. "I paid for my seat choice, why should you get yours for free?" Dozens of adults, genuinely angry. At a parent not wanting their young child to sit next to strangers on a flight.

They're not angry about a war, a policy or even a championship game. They're angry about the seat on the plane.

And I keep thinking: This is it. This is exactly it. This is what the bucket would look like if I was a crab.

But in the same way this isn't about the crabs, it's also not really about the seat. It's about you having something I can't have - even if that something is something you need and I don't. It's about scarcity. About your success making me feel bad. About somehow feeling less than someone else because they have something you don't.

Instead of arguing against the bucket, we're arguing against each other.

That's crab mentality. And it is everywhere.

Look Around

Jeffrey Epstein didn't operate alone. He operated inside a network of extraordinarily powerful people who protected their position, their access, their status - at the cost of children. Children. The most vulnerable people imaginable sacrificed on the altar of keeping the most powerful people exactly where they were.

That is crab mentality at its most grotesque. The bucket maintained at any cost. Escape prevented and people protected by pulling down anyone who might expose it.

Genocides are crab mentality scaled to nations. The logic that there is not enough land, enough safety, enough humanity to go around - so yours must be taken, denied, erased. That your existence makes mine less possible.

Abortion bans are crab mentality dressed as morality. Control over another person's body, another person's future, wielded by people who have decided that their values, their comfort, their vision of order is more important than another human being's autonomy. Pull them back into the bucket. Keep them where we need them to be.

The rise of racism, of sexism, of the casual cruelty that now passes for public discourse online - all of it flows from the same source. The deep, ancient, unexamined belief that there is not enough. Not enough safety, recognition, worth, power, space. And that someone else having more means I have less.

We have handed people a megaphone (the internet) and discovered that when you remove consequence, what comes out is mostly fear. Dressed up as opinion. Dressed up as freedom. But fear of not being good enough, at its root.

And then we wonder why our children are anxious, competitive and unable to genuinely collaborate.

Where This Starts

I need to be precise here, because this is the part that matters.

This is not a political piece. This is not a piece about left or right, progressive or conservative, East or West, North or South.

This is a piece about what happens to human beings who are raised to believe that worth is finite. That success is a competition. That someone else's brilliance is a threat to their own. That the ladder only goes one way and there are only so many rungs.

Because that belief doesn't stay abstract. It doesn't stay in the boardroom or the ballot box or the comment section. It lives in the body. It shapes the nervous system. It becomes a part of our children.

And it starts - it always starts - in the earliest relational environments a person experiences.

In whether the adults around a child modelled scarcity or abundance. Competition or collaboration. Conditional love or unconditional worth.

In whether they learned, in the most formative years of their neurological development, that there is enough. Enough recognition, enough space, enough safety, enough love. For everyone.

Or whether they learned that the bucket is real, and you'd better start climbing before someone pulls you down.

What Schools Are Sitting On

I work with international schools. I work with the parents of high-achieving, globally mobile children - parents who have climbed hard, built much and love their children ferociously.

And I see, every day, the gap between what schools are trying to build in their students and what the adults around those students are unconsciously modelling.

Schools talk about community. About kindness. About global citizenship and collaboration and the kind of young person who makes the world better. They mean it. They invest in it. They put it in their mission statements and their socio emotional learning programmes and their assemblies.

And then those children go home to adults who are still, quietly, operating from the bucket.

Not bad adults. Not unkind adults. Adults who were never helped to examine where their own sense of worth comes from. Who learned early that approval is conditional on achievement. Who built their identity on being ahead and who find, in their most honest moments, that someone else's success still feels like a threat to their nervous system.

You cannot build a culture of genuine collaboration in a school community if the adults in that community (all of them, faculty and parents alike) haven't done the work on their own relationship with scarcity and worth.

You can teach the values. You can model them in the classroom. You can run the workshops and write the policies.

But children don't learn from what we teach. They learn from what we are.

The Argument for Schools

The bucket is getting fuller. The pulls are getting harder. The world our children are inheriting is one where crab mentality has been normalised, amplified and in some cases institutionalised.

The schools that break this spiral will be the ones that will genuinely produce the next generation of humans this world desperately needs. They are the ones that understand that culture change is not a curriculum problem. It is a relational one. And it belongs to the whole community.

That means faculty. It means leadership. And it means parents - the most influential adults in a child's life, the ones with the most neurological and emotional access, the ones whose beliefs are inherited, regardless of intention.

The work of building children who climb out of the bucket and then reach back in to help others out starts with the adults around them doing exactly the same thing.

That work exists. It is evidence-based, relational and designed for the specific complexity of high-achieving school communities.

And it is, I would argue, the most important investment a school can make right now.

Not because it's a nice idea.

Because the bucket is getting very, very full.

I work with international schools to design and deliver relational development programmes for parent and faculty communities. If you lead or work within an international school and recognise this challenge, I'd welcome a conversation.