A shared benefit can depend on burdens too scattered for any one person to make visible.

Some good things rest on costs that are spread too thinly to be seen. Nobody’s individual burden is large enough to complain about, no single person can point at the whole of it, and so the benefit looks free when it is simply diffuse. Invisibility here is a property of the arithmetic rather than of anyone’s dishonesty.

When something in your life seems to run smoothly at no cost, look for the scattered burden. Ask who does the small pieces, how often, and whether they have any way of showing the total. Adding the pieces up, and saying the number out loud, is often the entire intervention that is needed.