THE LONG WATCH

There is a limestone cave system in northern Thailand called Tham Luang. Much of it can be walked on foot during the dry months. In the monsoon, sections of it become submerged and impassable. On the afternoon of June 23, 2018, twelve boys from a local soccer team called the Wild Boars and their twenty-five-year-old coach went into the cave to explore after practice.

The monsoon arrived early that year. By the time anyone noticed the boys had not come out, the water had risen behind them in the lower passages. They were several kilometers in, on dry ground, in pitch darkness, with one flashlight and almost no food.

The coach was named Ekkapol Chanthawong. He had spent ten years as a Buddhist monk before he became a soccer coach, and he understood, better than most twenty-five-year-old men would have, what was about to happen to the boys’ minds in the dark. So he taught them to meditate. He gave them his share of the small amount of food they had. He kept them on a schedule. He invented work for them to do.

Nine days of solitude later the rescue divers expected to find dead bodies, or boys who had broken down. They found neither. They found twelve thin, quiet, lucid boys and one exhausted coach who had spent the entire ordeal keeping them busy.

What determines who makes it out alive, in situations like these, is rarely the physical situation alone. It is whether the survivors feel they have agency. Shackleton invented duties for his men on the Antarctic ice. Ekkapol invented them in a Thai cave. Hospital wards, prison wings, long-haul submarines, every form of structured human survival runs on the same principle. The first thing you do when people might not make it is give them something they have to do. Work saves lives.

So what do we make of a techno-utopian future whose central selling point is the elimination of work?