The country got a Prime Minister and lost a semi-final on the same Wednesday. I know which one the pub was watching.

On Wednesday, at six o'clock, the country quietly settled who would run it. At eight, it stopped caring, because there was a football match.

I do not say that as a complaint. I say it because it is the most honest thing about us, and it is close to the thing this paper is actually about. A few million people arranged their evening around ninety minutes that changed nothing, that produced nothing, that they could not influence in the slightest, and they gave themselves to it completely. Argentina scored. We did not. The pub I was in made a noise I have not heard a room make in a while, and then it went quiet, and then people bought another round and talked, because the point was never really the result.

That is what we do when we are not working. Not the improving version, not the leisure the strategies imagine, where freed hours turn into learning and enterprise and self-betterment. The real version. We watch things that do not matter with people who do. We lose, together, on a Wednesday.

I keep coming back to it because the whole argument about the machines eventually arrives here, at the evening. If the promise is that AI hands us our time back, then this is what it is handing back: not productivity, not a side hustle, but the ordinary, unaccountable hours in which nothing is achieved and most of what makes a life happens. A room full of strangers groaning at a screen. The walk home. The next morning, when it turns out the country has a new Prime Minister after all, and the football is what you talk about on the platform.

We spend a great deal of energy asking what people will do when they no longer have to work. Tonight the answer was, simply, this. It was not wasted. It was the point.

We just lost the match first.