We already know what we would do without work. We are doing it tonight.

In 1930, with the world sliding into depression, John Maynard Keynes sat down to cheer everyone up. He wrote a short essay — "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" — that looked past the slump to a hundred years out, to roughly now. His prediction was extraordinary and, in its broad arithmetic, right: that the rich economies would grow so productive that the economic problem, the ancient struggle for enough, would be all but solved. His grandchildren, he thought, would face a stranger difficulty. With machines doing the work, people would have to learn what to do with their freedom. He guessed we would settle near fifteen hours a week, and work even that much mostly to feel useful.

We are the grandchildren. We got the wealth — Britain is far richer per head than in Keynes's day. We did not get the fifteen-hour week. Working hours fell for a century and then, somewhere in the late twentieth, stopped falling. We took the extra productivity as more: more output, more stuff, more square footage, more work. The leisure Keynes promised arrived as next-day delivery.

Why we made that bargain is one of the puzzles of modern economics, and the answers are not flattering. Wants are not fixed — give people more and they find more to want. Work became identity: in a culture with little else to confer status, the job is who you are, and busyness is a boast. And some of it, Keynes himself feared, is that we are frightened of the empty hour. He worried about the breakdown of people, especially comfortable people, with nothing they had to do. The fear of leisure is old, and it is mostly a fear of finding out who we are when nobody is paying us to be someone.

That fear is worth testing against evidence, and Britain has run the experiment. In 2022, sixty-one UK companies and around 2,900 workers took part in the largest four-day-week trial in the world: a day off, a day's less work, no cut in pay. The results, published in early 2023 and followed up a year on, were not ambiguous. Revenue held broadly steady. Sick days fell by around two-thirds. Burnout dropped, wellbeing rose, people stayed in their jobs. A year later the great majority of the firms were still doing it, and about half had made it permanent. Asked what they did with the freed day, workers gave a deflatingly ordinary answer: caring for people, hobbies, chores, time saved for the weekend. Not breakdown. Not a crisis of meaning. Errands and their kids.

This is the part Keynes missed, and it is hiding in plain sight in our own national statistics. The ONS Time Use study — which simply asks people to write down what they did all day — finds that after sleep, British adults spend the biggest slice of their free time on entertainment and socialising, around three and a half hours a day, much of it in front of a television. A great deal of the rest of the non-working day is not free at all: it is unpaid work, housework and above all care, and it falls unevenly, with women doing roughly an hour a day more of it than men. We are not, it turns out, mysterious about what we do off the clock. We watch, we gather, we feed people, we look after the young and the old, we rest. We have been answering Keynes's question every evening of our lives.

Tonight answers it too, and louder. A few hours from now a large part of this country will sit down in front of a World Cup match that produces nothing and means everything — the species clocking off together. Down in Somerset the most famous field in British music sits deliberately empty, a fallow year, resting so the joy survives. In a thousand kitchens someone is steeping hedgerow elderflowers for no wage at all. None of it is productive. All of it is the good life, and we plainly already know how to live it.

So the question this paper keeps asking — what will we do when we don't have to work? — turns out to be the easy one. We know the answer. We would do more of what we do on a Friday night: care, play, gather, make, rest. The hard question is the one underneath, and it is not about imagination at all. It is about distribution. Who gets the freed hours, and who gets handed someone else's?

And freed time will be fought over, not granted. The same year as the trial, polling for the campaign behind it found nearly four in five UK workers wanted a four-day week and most expected it to be normal by 2030. Employers were less keen: the main HR body found two-thirds of them expecting no such change within a decade. That gap — between the time people want back and the time those who run the work will give — is the whole contest in miniature. The four-day week worked, but it reached 2,900 people, not the cleaner on a zero-hours contract or the carer doing the unpaid shift the statistics already measure. As work thins out, and on this paper's beat it is thinning, the freed time will not fall evenly from the sky. It gets allocated — by employers, by policy, by who can afford it. The danger is not a society lost for something to do. It is one where a few inherit Keynes's leisure and the many inherit the second job that pays for it.

Which makes the timing of this particular Friday almost too neat. All week Westminster has been consumed with who should govern: a by-election won, a leadership challenge gathering, the ferocious business of who holds the office. Almost none of that energy has gone to what the office is for as the work changes underneath it. The leadership of a country is being fought over by people with, as far as one can tell, no account of the largest shift in working life since Keynes picked up his pen. That is the gap this paper was built to name.

Ninety-five years on, his grandchildren have his wealth and his question. We squandered the first answer — took the riches, kept the grind. We will not get to squander the second. The machines really are coming for the hours this time, and the only thing left to decide is whose hours they free, and whose they do not. Pour the cordial. Watch the match. Then ask the harder thing.