Karma is traffic

The one where I make mystics and seculars mad alike

“Karma is a bitch.” Maybe you’ve heard. Maybe you’ve said it.

That’s the “pop understanding” of karma, anyway. Karma as poetic justice. “What goes around comes around.” Someone cuts in line and loses their wallet. Someone cheats and gets cheated on. “Karma.”

Well… pop understandings are wrong about basically everything. We’ll come back to that in the future.

For now, let’s get a proper understanding of karma, by tracing back to its sources.

Karma: Classic

The idea of “karma” comes from Eastern philosophies where it is understood as the principle that every action has consequences, specifically shaping future experiences in accordance to the moral quality of those actions. It suggests that good deeds lead to positive outcomes and harmful actions lead to suffering—either in this life or across lifetimes.

Karma reflects the idea that our choices ripple outward, influencing not just our own lives but the world around us, often returning to us in unexpected ways. Less normative moral punishment played straight, more butterfly-effect-style description of how cause and effect naturally unfold.

Actions ripple. Patterns compound. Cause and effect cascade. Karma is about how your choices echo—through your life, and through the world. Through others and through time.

Which all sounds very beautiful... and very vague.

So let me take a stab at making it concrete for modern, secular ears: karma… is traffic.

Stay with me, I’ll bring this baby home. But, to do so, we need to do the shortest of detours through threshold models of collective behavior.

Threshold Models

Threshold models of collective behavior were famously introduced by Thomas Schelling. (What, you thought he was a one trick pony? Shame.)

In Schelling’s model, each individual has a threshold: the number of people they need to see taking an action before they join in.

Picture a riot. One person throws a rock (threshold 0). Another joins in once the first one has done it (threshold 1). Then someone else needs to see two people. And so on. If the distribution lines up—you get a cascade.

A successful riot. :)

This model is used in sociology, political science, and economics to explain tipping point effects, social spread and contagion, and collective action problems.

The cool thing is that it shows how one person can have such an outsized effect. If the zeroth person—the one with the 0 threshold—isn’t present to start the action then literally nothing happens. But if they are then a riot starts. The butterfly that flapped its wings. One person’s actions make all the difference.

A failed riot. :(

Which brings us back to traffic.

Karma: Traffic

Bad driver, bad!

Drive smoothly—flowing with intention, signalling clearly, adapting— and you make everything better. Not just for you, but for everyone around you. In ripples. A hundred cars behind you flow easier. A stranger gets home earlier. Their kid sees them more. They grow up with less anger.

Drive erratically, like the car above—with sudden brakes, hesitation, speeding up then slamming on the brakes—and you send chaos backwards through space and time. Someone misses an exit. Someone else rear-ends a third party. Someone’s day gets worse. So does their mood. So does your karma.

Your driving is your karma, but it becomes everyone else’s traffic.

Karma: izza vibe

“Ok, thanks, but why should I care, I don’t even drive.” Oh, buddy, but you do. Like Molière discovering at 40 he had been speaking in prose all his life you’re about to discover you’ve been driving all your life, even if your hands never once touched a steering wheel.

“Driving” isn’t cars. It’s every system you move through: conversations. Institutions. Social media. Friend groups. Cities.

Your actions shapes those systems. But so do your moods.

There’s a German word—Stimmung—that means both mood and atmosphere. Humans broadcast. You can walk into a room and feel tension, or courage, or ease. A confident speaker makes a room braver. Courage is contagious. A fearful leader, on the other hand, makes a crowd panic.

So your “driving” isn’t just cars. It’s not even just “what you do”. It’s “who you be”.

You're not just driving, nor are you “just” acting: you’re broadcasting. Constantly. Ambiently. Contagiously.

This is why working on yourself—becoming more resilient to bad moods, more intentional in your actions, more aware of your impact—isn't just self-improvement. It's a system improvement. It's better traffic flow for everyone.

Yes, yes the red emojis should be frowning and the yellow smiling. The miracle machine isn’t yet 100% perfect. My apologies.

Conclusion: Improving your driving karma

Through your actions or your presence—what you broadcast into the world—you inevitably shape the systems around you.

Karma isn’t moralistic bookkeeping, it’s a lens on how complex systems work. A theory of ripple effects, not of retribution. Less about what you deserve and more about what your actions set in motion.

Living in the world of karma is to come to terms with the fact that there is no neutral stance. No opt-out. Your choices, your moods, your mere vibe—all of it ripples outward, compounding through feedback loops you’ll never fully see. Reflexivity is built in. (We’ll return to that in the future too.)

No, you cannot predict the exact outcomes of your actions. But you can shape the field of probability. You can learn to drive better—on the road, in life.

And you must. For this is where you’ve been driving:

The road of life