The Cauldron
The Cauldron
Daily Debate — 21 February 2026
Today I took my son to Twickenham to watch England play Ireland in the Six Nations. We lost. Eighty-two thousand people packed into a stadium on a Saturday afternoon, roaring at thirty men chasing an oval ball, and our boys came up short. It was gloriously, defiantly pointless.
And that's exactly why it matters.
We will spend a lot of time on this site talking about what automation will replace. The consulting room, the checkout, the call centre, the cockpit, all of them, eventually, in the crosshairs of systems that can do the job faster, cheaper, and without needing a lunch break. But nobody is automating Maro Itoje, who won his hundredth cap today, smashing into an Irish maul. Nobody is automating the collective intake of breath when a fly-half shapes to kick for the corner. The whole point of sport is that a human being is doing something difficult, with their actual body, under pressure, and might fail as dismally as they did today. Take away the human, and you take away the meaning. Sport is perhaps the purest example of an automatable endeavour.
Which raises a question about the world FOME describes. If abundance frees people from the obligation to work, what do they do? The pessimists imagine purposelessness, anomie, a civilisation rotting on its sofa. But look around this stadium. Nobody here is being productive. Nobody is generating anything more than noise. They've paid hundreds of pounds for the privilege of doing something that has no economic utility whatsoever, and they are alive with it.
Now imagine this didn't have to be squeezed into a Saturday. Imagine sport, playing it, watching it, coaching it, arguing about it in the pub afterwards, could happen on any day of the week, because people weren't chained to a schedule that treats leisure as the scraps left over after the economy has had its fill. More people available means more people playing. More people playing means more levels, more leagues, more variety. Not just the elite, but the whole glorious pyramid of human physical endeavour, from the international stage down to the park pitch.
And there's a darker thread running through all of this that abundance also cuts. Right now, the joy of sport is underwritten by a quiet cruelty. The prop who can barely walk at fifty. The flanker whose knees are grinding bone on bone before his children have left school. We cheer the collision, and someone else pays for it in cortisone injections and hip replacements and careers that end, brutally, at thirty-five. In the world FOME describes, where the same convergence of AI and biotechnology that reshapes the economy also reshapes medicine, this bargain changes entirely. Injuries that are currently career-ending become eminently treatable and fast. Ageing itself slows. Sporting lives lengthen. The window in which a human body can do extraordinary things widens from a desperate sliver into something generous and sustainable. Sport stops being a thing we enjoy on the back of somebody else's pain, and becomes what it always should have been: pure, unalloyed physical joy, without the guilt.
But there's something deeper here, too, something I felt in the stands today. That roar when England ran out wasn't rational. Supporting a sports team is, if you think about it, a kind of performed tribalism, an instinct left over from an age when identifying with your group was a matter of survival. We know it's manufactured. We know the national anthem before a rugby match is not the same as a genuine call to arms. And yet it works. It gets tens of thousands of strangers to feel, for eighty minutes, like they belong to something larger than themselves.
That instinct, the need to rally behind a shared cause, to feel the electricity of collective purpose, is not a bug. It's a feature. And it's the very thing we need to harness to navigate the transition FOME describes. Because getting from here to abundance isn't a technical problem. It's a coordination problem. It requires people to believe in a future worth building, and to feel that belief together.
Every great movement in history has drawn on this same tribal circuitry. The question is whether we can direct it toward something more consequential than a scoreboard; toward a shared vision of what the world could become when scarcity stops dictating the terms.
I didn't expect to find the answer to that question on the final whistle.
We lost. As an England supporter, it was painful. But my son, twelve years old, autistic, possessed of the intellect and bearing of an aloof eighteenth-century man of letters, was entirely calm about the whole affair. Not upset. Not performing bravery. Just… composed, in that way he has of observing the world from a slight and dignified distance.
The Irish fans around us didn't know this about him. They saw a boy sitting in a sea of white shirts after a home defeat, and they presumed he'd be hurting. So they looked after him. Taps on the shoulder. "Better luck next time, son." "I hope you have better luck when you come to Dublin." One woman pressed her souvenir programme into his hands and wouldn't hear of taking it back.
All the passion, all the rivalry, all the tribal roar; that had been out there on the pitch, in the cauldron. But here, in the stands, among actual people, was something else entirely. Fellowship. Tenderness. The instinct not to crush a rival but to comfort a child.
Yuval Noah Harari writes that human genius lies not in our tools but in our stories, the shared fictions that enable millions of strangers to cooperate. He's right. And there in that stadium, in the space between the final whistle and the walk to the cab, was the answer to the question that haunts every conversation about a post-work world: what do we do when we no longer have to do anything?
We get great at things we love. We share stories. We share visceral experiences, joy and pain alike, and we discover that this is what matters. This is what it is to be human. Not the productivity. Not the GDP. The sharing.
The cauldron is boiling. And what we cook up in it, it turns out, is fellowship.
What do you think? Is sport a model for post-work meaning, or just a distraction from building it? Join the debate.
