Hope Springs

Hope Springs

23rd February 2026

There is a daffodil in my garden that knows something most economists don’t.

It knows that scarcity ends. Not theoretically, not in some projected future, but actually, materially, now; in the soil, in the light, in the lengthening of days. It has been underground for months, waiting, and now it is here, absurdly golden, facing the sun like a trumpet announcing something obvious that everyone has somehow forgotten.

As a GP, I prescribe antidepressants. And I never, if I can help it, plan a withdrawal cycle that ends in winter. This is not a quirk of practice; it is a recognition of something deep and true about human beings. We are creatures of light. We are wired for abundance. When the days shorten and the world contracts, when the trees surrender their leaves and the cold presses in, something in us contracts too. December is not the time to remove a pharmacological safety net. December is scarcity made weather.

For many years, I have watched this pattern in my consulting room. The same patient who sits before me in February, hollowed out, convinced that nothing will ever change, will sit before me in May and laugh at something. Not because their circumstances have changed. Because the world outside the window has remembered how to be generous.

This is not a metaphor. This is biology. This is physics. This is the deep grammar of life on a tilted planet orbiting a star.

And I confess: I hate autumn. I know this is heresy. I know about the cosy cult, the fetishisation of the ruby cheek and the chunky sweater, the pumpkin spice, the “crisp morning walks.” I know that social media is filled with people performing their love of decay, teaching themselves and each other to find beauty in the closing down of things. And some of that beauty is real; I am not a monster. But I cannot escape the feeling that the cult of autumn is, at its heart, an exercise in learning to love scarcity. It is practice for accepting less. It is the aestheticisation of loss.

We do this in economics too. We teach people that scarcity is the foundational condition, the first principle, the water we swim in. We build entire civilisations on the assumption that there will never be enough. And then we wonder why people are depressed.

But the daffodil does not believe in permanent scarcity. The daffodil is an empiricist. It has tested the hypothesis every year of its life, and the data is unambiguous: winter ends. The sun returns. The energy that drives all life on this planet is not running out; it is, in fact, absurdly, almost comically abundant. Every hour, the sun delivers more energy to the Earth’s surface than humanity uses in a year. The daffodil knows this in its cells.

What if we built an economics that started from the daffodil’s premise? Not from scarcity but from the recognition that we are, for the first time in human history, developing the tools to harvest abundance at scale? Artificial intelligence, solar energy, fusion on the horizon; these are not speculative fantasies. They are the spring that is coming. They are the lengthening of civilisational days.

The patient in my consulting room believes that winter is permanent. They need to understand that, in a very real sense, it isn’t now. They need to be shown the daffodil.

Viva la spring.