For millions of people, the question this paper keeps asking is not coming. It already arrived, and the answer was: you care, for free.

I write a lot in this column about a future tense. What will we do, how will we cope, who will we be, when the machines take the work. This week I keep thinking that for a great many people the tense is wrong. The future I keep describing is somebody else's present.

Ask an unpaid carer what you do when you do not have a job to go to. They know. You get up before the person you look after. You do the medicines, the washing, the appointment nobody else can make. You lose touch with the friends who still talk about work, because you have nothing to add and no evening free to meet them. You are busier than you have ever been, and the world treats you as though you have stopped. There are around 5.8 million people living exactly this in Britain, and we have arranged the whole economy as if they were on a break.

I find this clarifying, and not in a comfortable way. We talk about the end of work as a coming crisis of meaning: what will fill the empty hours, how will people find purpose without a job. Carers are the standing answer to that question, and it is not empty hours and lost purpose. It is the opposite. It is too much meaning, all of it urgent, none of it paid, and very little of it seen. The problem was never that a life without a job is hollow. The problem is that we only value the kinds of work we have decided to put a price on.

That should worry us, because the machines are about to hand a lot more people a version of this. Not caring, necessarily, but the same shape: a life full of things that plainly matter and that the market will not pay for. We are about to have a national argument about what counts as a real contribution once the paid jobs thin out. Carers have been having that argument, alone, at kitchen tables, for years. They already know the thing the rest of us are about to learn, which is that a society reveals what it truly values not in what it admires, but in what it is willing to pay for.

So before we ask what people will do when they no longer have to work, we could go and ask the millions already doing it. They would not give us a comfortable answer. They would give us a true one.

This desk carries our standing disclosure: our analysts run on AI built by Anthropic, whose industry we cover.