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The first path I became familiar with was walked when I was in nursery school in the mid-1960’s. My mother would walk me to school each morning. At the time, it felt like 4–5 miles, but it turns out it was only about 4–5 blocks away from our tiny apartment on the west side of Madison, Wisconsin where she, my younger sister and I lived.
There was a familiar visual rhythm which unfolded before us each day. Certain cracks in the sidewalk, a hollowed-out tree trunk to peer down into, a mailbox with airplane wings which was 6-feet off the ground and had “airmail” stenciled on its side, and the highlight of the journey—a massive rock ledge I could shimmy up to gaze upon my vast 6-year-old’s empire. Similar to the distance I thought we walked; time also turned my youthful El Capitan into a disappointing 2-foot drop back to the sidewalk.
Still, these and other focal points were all indexed into my brain and what started out as an unknown adventure became a familiar and comforting route. Sixty years later if my mother told me to meet her at “the boulder”—we would both know instantly where to go to find each other.
This first childhood path led to many others and eventually meandered into establishing several well-worn adult versions. The commute path became well-established—even with a job change shaking things up now and then I could quickly reform an everyday route and settle into knowing what was around the next corner.
I didn’t know it at the time, but what I was establishing with my mother and then on my own, was what economist and game theorist Thomas Schelling called “focal points”—later coined “Schelling Points”, which emanated from his landmark book from 1960, “The Strategy of Conflict”. Schelling’s book explored how people are able to coordinate decisions in situations where they cannot communicate directly. Through a series of experiments and thought exercises, he discovered that people often gravitate toward certain obvious or culturally significant choices—places, times, symbols, or ideas that naturally stand out within a shared social context—because they assume others will do the same.
This concept expanded into most facets of our daily lives in both micro and macro ways—economics, psychology, urban planning, politics, culture, and technology. And of course, as ever, it’s within the technological changes of the last 2–3 decades where this has been most radically altered.
Schelling’s most famous experiment asked people if they had to meet someone in NYC without communication—where and when would they meet? Grand Central Terminal at noon was the most popular answer. I suspect if I asked that same question for Pittsburgh, it might be The Point at noon. For certain generations—both had become physical civic anchors—places people could instinctively use as meeting places or a shared cultural shorthand for the city itself.
But we no longer—as frequently—interact with our physical civic anchors.
Our lease is up next year and our firm, like multitudes of others, is trying to decide what is the best way to integrate the post pandemic remote and in-person workforce. Expand? Contract? Mandate or cajole in-person? Turn your office into a coffee shop? Some want to nest, some want to plug and play, some don’t ever want to set foot in the office again.
Whatever happens—we’re hybrid now. Online communities frequently converge around dominant platforms, hashtags, file formats, communication tools, or social conventions because the users expect others to gather there as well. Social media trends and meme culture often do reflect Schelling Point dynamics—people coordinating around what feels most visible, trusted, or perhaps just attention getting.
And as a result, have our Schelling Points migrated to the digital and social spheres? Hashtags and emojis in Zoom rooms instead of handshakes and body language in conference rooms? This shift—and I grant you it’s a generational thing—feels hollow and siloed to me.
I disentangled myself from social media a couple years back, made a commitment to drive to work, and have tried to re-establish more physical, albeit personal, Schelling Points—reading certain signs in business windows, noting the various parents and kids at school bus stops, successfully navigating the confusing 5-way intersection, appreciating a freshly cut lawn, observing the skyline at sunset, and generally becoming familiar again with a route of passage. These small things feel grounding.
If there was just a massive boulder to survey my vast 65-year-old’s empire, I’d be set.
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