It happens fast. You turn your back on a garden for two weeks, and suddenly the kale is choked by crabgrass and the tomatoes are split wide open. Or maybe it’s your local diner. One month the coffee is hot and the eggs are perfect; the next, the vinyl booths are tearing and the staff looks like they haven't slept since the Eisenhower administration. We have a specific phrase for this slow-motion car crash of quality: things to go to pot.
It’s an old-school idiom. It feels dusty, maybe something your grandfather would say while looking at a rusted-out Buick. But the reality behind it is deeply connected to entropy, economics, and how we manage our daily lives.
Honestly, we’re obsessed with growth. We want things to get better, faster, and shinier. Yet, the natural state of the universe—thanks to the second law of thermodynamics—is actually a steady slide toward chaos. Things want to fall apart. Left to their own devices, they do.
The Weird History of Letting Things Slide
Where did this even come from? Some people will tell you it’s about cooking. You take leftovers, or maybe parts of an animal that aren't the "prime cuts," and you throw them in a pot to make a stew because they aren’t good for anything else. Basically, the quality has dropped so far that the only thing left to do is boil it into submission.
Others argue it’s more literal. In the 16th century, "pot" was often shorthand for the melting pot used for scrap metal. If a tool was broken beyond repair, it went into the pot to be melted down and turned into something else. It was the end of the line.
Either way, the vibe is the same. It’s about the loss of utility.
Why Your Business is Starting to Go to Pot
In the world of commerce, this isn't just a metaphor; it’s a death sentence. It’s rarely a sudden explosion. It’s a series of tiny, almost invisible concessions.
Take "shrinkflation." It’s a classic example of a brand starting to go to pot. A company realizes they can save $0.04 per unit by changing the recipe of their chocolate bar. No one notices. Then they reduce the packaging size. Then they cut the customer service budget. Suddenly, you’re standing in an aisle holding a waxy, tasteless brick of brown sugar wondering why you ever liked this brand.
Harvard Business Review has looked at this through the lens of "Service Drift." It’s the idea that without constant, aggressive maintenance of standards, the baseline for "good" slowly drops. Managers get tired. Employees get burned out. The "pot" is always waiting.
If you're running a team, you've probably seen this happen during a transition period. You lose one key person—the "glue" guy—and within three months, the filing system is a disaster and people are missing deadlines. It’s a chain reaction.
The Mental Toll of the Decline
It’s not just about objects or businesses. Our habits are just as prone to this.
You know the feeling. You start the year with a gym routine and a meal prep plan. By March, the gym bag is buried under a pile of mail and you’re eating cereal for dinner for the third night in a row. You’ve let things to go to pot.
Psychologists often point to "decision fatigue" as the culprit here. We only have so much willpower. When life gets heavy—maybe work is stressful or you’re dealing with family issues—the "maintenance" tasks are the first things we drop. We stop cleaning the kitchen. We stop answering non-urgent texts. We let the internal garden grow weeds.
It’s actually a survival mechanism. We prioritize the fire right in front of us, but the cost is the slow erosion of everything else.
When Infrastructure Goes to Pot
Look at the bridges. No, seriously.
In the United States, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) puts out a "Report Card" for infrastructure. For years, the grades have been hovering around a D or a C-. This is a macro-example of letting things go to pot on a national scale. We build something magnificent, then we forget that concrete crumbles and steel rusts.
Maintenance isn't sexy. No politician gets a ribbon cutting for "Keeping the Bridge from Falling Down via Routine Painting." They get ribbons for the new bridge. Because we ignore the boring work of upkeep, the cost of repair eventually skyrockets.
It’s way cheaper to paint a bridge than to replace one that has collapsed into a river.
Spotting the Warning Signs
How do you know if a situation is starting to turn? It’s usually in the details.
- The "Broken Window" Effect: If a small problem isn't fixed, it signals that no one cares. This leads to bigger problems.
- Language Shifts: When people stop saying "How do we make this great?" and start saying "Is this good enough to pass?", you're in trouble.
- The Loss of Ritual: In personal lives, this looks like skipping the small things—making the bed, the Sunday phone call to mom, the evening walk.
Reversing the Slide
Can you fix it once things have gone to pot?
Yeah. But it’s harder than starting from scratch.
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You have to perform what engineers call "remediation." You aren't just maintaining anymore; you're excavating. You have to clear out the "pot" and start over. In a business, this usually means a "back to basics" campaign. Think of Domino’s Pizza in 2009. They literally ran ads saying, "Our crust tastes like cardboard," and then they rebuilt the recipe from the ground up.
In your personal life, it means radical honesty. It means looking at the messy room or the credit card debt and admitting that the "maintenance" phase is over and the "recovery" phase has begun.
Actionable Steps to Keep Things from Going to Pot
Prevention is the only real cure for entropy. If you want to keep your life, your house, or your career from sliding into the scrap heap, you need a system that doesn't rely on "feeling motivated."
Audit your "low-stakes" environments. Look at your car, your desktop icons, or your junk drawer. These are the early warning systems. If these are a mess, the high-stakes areas of your life are likely next.
Schedule the unsexy stuff. Set a recurring calendar invite for "The Boring Review." Use this time to check your bank statements, look for wear and tear on your home, or just check in with a friend you haven't spoken to.
Stop the "Good Enough" creep. Once a week, pick one thing you’ve been settling for and fix it properly. Don't just tape the leaky pipe; call the plumber. Don't just apologize for a late report; fix the workflow that made it late.
Invest in quality over quantity. Things made of solid wood, real leather, or robust code take longer to go to pot than the cheap, disposable versions. You’re buying yourself time.
The "pot" is always there, simmering in the background. It’s the natural destination for everything we neglect. Staying out of it isn't about one big heroic effort; it’s about the small, annoying, daily choices to keep the weeds at bay and the screws tightened.
Maintain the things you care about, or prepare to melt them down.