The price of stability in an unstable world

October 19, 2026 Leave a comment

We have been sold a dangerous idea that stability is normal and disruption is the exception, but is it? Yes, stability is an achievement, though an expensive one! Every morning, when the electricity is on, the internet works, the bank processes a transaction, food reaches you from a quick-commerce platform, a child gets to school, a salary arrives on time, and a hospital has the medicines it needs, it means thousands of invisible systems are doing their job in the background. We notice them only when they fail. For most of modern history, perhaps the greatest privilege was not wealth but predictability, the reasonable expectation that tomorrow would look broadly like today. That expectation is now harder to sustain as wars are disrupting supply chains, climate events are destroying livelihoods, artificial intelligence is unsettling occupations, financial volatility travels across borders in milliseconds, and demographic change is altering the very structure of families and work. We are entering an era in which instability may no longer be a temporary interruption to ordinary life but may become the usual.

So, who pays for stability in an unstable world? The obvious answer is governments, which build roads, maintain electricity grids, regulate financial systems, run hospitals, banks, police, and borders, subsidise food, respond to disasters, and provide social protection. But businesses pay too, as they maintain inventories, assets, diversify suppliers, retain cash and build redundancy into systems that would otherwise be cheaper and more efficient. So do families, as they keep emergency savings, buy insurance, invest in education, maintain social networks and sometimes make profoundly conservative choices because the consequences of failure are too high. Individuals pay in ways that don’t appear anywhere on a balance sheet. They stay in jobs they dislike because they’re secure. They postpone starting a business because they cannot afford six months without an income. They choose a predictable career over an uncertain vocation. They save instead of spending. They remain in cities they don’t particularly love because the city offers better healthcare, schools and employment opportunities. Stability, in other words, is not free, and we purchase it every day, often without realising that we are doing so.

But we don’t all pay the same price for instability. A wealthy household can absorb a medical emergency, while a poor household may have to borrow, sell an asset or withdraw a child from school. Likewise, a large corporation can survive a temporary collapse in demand, whereas a small enterprise may shut down permanently. A professional with savings can spend six months learning a new skill, and at the same time a casual worker may not be able to afford six days without income. The ability to absorb a shock is itself becoming a form of wealth. We have traditionally measured inequality through income, consumption and assets. Perhaps we now need another measure: the unequal distribution of uncertainty. Two families earning the same amount can live completely different lives if one has savings, insurance, secure housing, social capital and access to credit while the other survives from one monthly payment to the next.

Consider the millions of informal workers in India whose economic lives were disrupted during the COVID-19 lockdown. For many, the crisis was not simply about losing a job. It meant losing the entire architecture through which survival happened, like their daily wages, transport, access to urban work and sometimes food itself. The images of migrant workers walking hundreds of kilometres home became one of the defining visual memories of the pandemic. The crisis revealed how much of India’s economic stability was being privately financed by people with almost no financial cushion. When formal systems failed, the burden was transferred to households, communities and individual workers, where families became the insurance company of last resort.

Something similar happens every day, at a smaller scale, when an illness strikes a low-income household. India has made enormous progress in expanding healthcare access, insurance and public health infrastructure, but for millions of families, healthcare expenditure can still become a destabilising financial event. The difference between a middle-class household experiencing a serious illness and a poor household experiencing the same illness is not simply the quality of medical treatment available. One family may recover financially after recovering medically, while the other may spend years repaying debt. The illness turns into a crisis cascade of healthcare expenses, debt, reduced consumption, interrupted education and sometimes the sale of productive assets.

Climate change is producing another version of the same problem. Take a small farmer in Bihar, Assam, Odisha or Rajasthan. Agriculture has always involved uncertainty, but climate volatility is changing the scale and frequency of that uncertainty. An unexpected flood, prolonged heat, irregular rainfall or pest outbreak can wipe out months of effort. We often respond by telling farmers to become ‘climate resilient’, adopt new practices, diversify crops or use technology. All of these can be useful, but we tend to forget that resilience requires resources. A farmer with savings, irrigation, crop insurance, access to credit and market information has options. A farmer who owns little land and depends entirely on one seasonal harvest has very few. We cannot keep asking the poorest citizens to become more resilient without asking whether we have given them the financial and institutional infrastructure with which resilience can actually be built.

The same contradiction is visible in India’s growing, small-enterprise economy. We celebrate entrepreneurship and tell young people to become entrepreneurs, women to start enterprises, rural communities to build businesses and small producers to enter digital markets. Yet entrepreneurship is, by definition, an encounter with uncertainty. A person with substantial capital can afford entrepreneurial failure, but, say, a woman investing her family’s only savings in a small enterprise cannot. When a rural woman starts a tailoring unit, food-processing business, handloom enterprise or digital service centre, she is not merely creating income but is taking a financial risk on behalf of her household. This is why access to credit alone is not enough and entrepreneurs need markets, digital access, business capabilities, working capital, insurance, peer networks and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to fail without falling into destitution.

And then there is the instability coming from new-age technology. AI may create extraordinary new opportunities, but it will also change the value of many existing skills. We tell older workers to remain employable in a labour market changing faster than the institutions designed to train them. But learning itself requires time, money and psychological space. The person working ten hours a day to pay rent cannot effortlessly become an AI-enabled professional at night. The person supporting a family cannot always afford to experiment with a new career. Adaptability is not simply an attitude; it is an economic resource.

This is where our understanding of resilience needs to change. We have increasingly turned resilience into an individual virtue of being adaptable, keep learning, diversify your income, build an emergency fund, exercise, take care of your mental health, prepare for the future, etc., etc. There is nothing wrong with any of this, but we risk creating a society in which structural instability is increasingly privatised. At some point we have to ask whether we are confusing resilience with the ability of individuals to absorb risks that should partly be shared by institutions.

How to prevent uncertainty from becoming catastrophic for ordinary people, perhaps, will be the central economic challenge of the next few decades. We cannot promise a farmer that the monsoon will behave, a worker that her job will exist for thirty years, or that the next pandemic, financial crisis or geopolitical shock will never happen. But we can design systems in which these events do not permanently destroy a person’s future. That would require a different conception of social protection. The welfare state of the industrial era was largely built around protecting people from particular risks of unemployment, old age, illness, disability and poverty. The unstable world ahead may require something more dynamic, like systems that help people move through disruption. 

The cost of living without psychological certainty is another hidden cost of instability that economists struggle to capture, where uncertainty consumes mental bandwidth. When you don’t know whether your job will survive, whether a medical emergency could wipe out your savings or whether your child’s education will remain affordable, some part of your mind is permanently occupied by contingency planning. And that has implications beyond individual wellbeing. A society in which people are perpetually afraid of falling backwards is unlikely to be as entrepreneurial, innovative or creative as a society in which people know that failure will not destroy them.

This produces a fascinating paradox as we want an innovative economy, but innovation requires risk. Perhaps, therefore, the goal should not be stability in the conventional sense. We should stop trying to build a world in which nothing goes wrong, as such a world does not exist. The goal should be recoverability, where the capacity of people, families, businesses and communities to recover when something inevitably goes wrong should be present. This is ultimately a question of what kind of social contract we want. The price of stability will rise as the world becomes more volatile. Governments will spend more on resilience. Companies will pay more for redundancy and security. Families will save more. Individuals will invest more in skills and insurance. But if we allow every emerging risk to be pushed downwards from governments to companies, from companies to workers, from institutions to families and finally from families to individuals, we will create a society that appears economically efficient while becoming increasingly fragile.

We have become obsessed with efficiency precisely when the world is demanding resilience. We have spent decades removing buffers because buffers looked like waste, including excess inventory, spare capacity, multiple suppliers, idle infrastructure, permanent workers, and generous social protection. Everything had to be optimised, become leaner, faster and cheaper. Until the world reminded us that the things we call inefficiencies are sometimes the very things that keep systems alive when they break. So, the question we should be asking is not how much stability we can afford. It is how much instability ordinary people can afford to absorb before a temporary shock becomes a permanent change in their lives. Because the future will not belong to those who successfully predict every disruption. Nobody can. It will belong to societies that make disruption survivable. And if we fail to build those societies, we may discover a deeply uncomfortable truth that the poor will not merely be the people with the least money, but they will be the people who can afford the least uncertainty.

(The cover image is generated using AI)

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Behavioural Systems Approach to Rural Entrepreneurship Development

October 12, 2026 Leave a comment

The popular approach to rural entrepreneurship in India often includes providing poor households with access to credit, skills training, subsidies, or market linkages, which will naturally lead to entrepreneurship development. This assumption has shaped countless development programs led by governments, NGOs, microfinance institutions, and multilateral agencies. Two individuals living in the same village, receiving identical training and similar financial support, often experience vastly different entrepreneurial trajectories. One may build a sustainable enterprise, expand into new markets, and improve household income, while another may abandon the effort entirely despite possessing comparable resources. Conventional development frameworks struggle to explain this divergence because they remain overwhelmingly focused on material inputs rather than behavioural systems.

I am proposing the READ Framework (Readiness, Exposure, Aspiration, and Direction), which can shift the analytical lens from resource scarcity to behavioural conditions that shape economic action. Rather than treating entrepreneurship as a linear outcome of financial or technical support, the model suggests that enterprise creation depends on a dynamic interaction between psychological preparedness, social exposure, aspirations for mobility, and clarity of execution pathways. This perspective is particularly important in contemporary India, where entrepreneurship has become central to the national development narrative, and yet rural livelihoods remain constrained by social inequality, institutional gaps, and behavioural barriers that are often invisible within conventional policy frameworks.

India’s economic transformation over the past three decades has generated significant growth, but it has also exposed structural contradictions. Although India aspires to become a major global economic power, a large proportion of its population continues to live in rural areas dependent on fragile agriculture-based livelihoods. According to the World Bank, nearly two-thirds of India’s population still resides in rural areas, while agriculture contributes a relatively small share of GDP. This imbalance has intensified pressure on rural households to diversify income sources beyond farming. Rural entrepreneurship is therefore increasingly viewed as a pathway for employment generation, women’s empowerment, local economic resilience, and reduction of distress migration. Government initiatives such as Startup India, Mudra Yojana, and the National Rural Livelihoods Mission reflect this policy emphasis. However, despite substantial investments in microcredit, self-help groups, and skill development programs, many interventions continue to produce limited or unsustainable outcomes. The limitations of conventional entrepreneurship models arise partly from their assumption that individuals act rationally once economic barriers are removed. The prevailing logic can be summarised as a straightforward sequence of inputs leading to skills, enterprise, income (Inputs -> Skills -> Enterprise -> Income).

Development economists such as Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have demonstrated that poverty fundamentally shapes cognition and decision-making. Scarcity creates what behavioural economists describe as a ‘bandwidth tax,’ reducing people’s ability to plan long-term, tolerate risk, or experiment economically. Poverty is therefore not merely a shortage of money, but a condition that influences imagination, confidence, emotional resilience, and perceptions of possibility. The READ framework is developed upon this intellectual foundation but advances it further by conceptualising entrepreneurship as an interconnected behavioural ecosystem rather than a collection of isolated economic variables.

The framework proposes that entrepreneurial outcomes are a function of four interacting dimensions: Readiness, Exposure, Aspiration, and Direction.

E = f(R,Ex,A,D)

The formulation is simple and treats entrepreneurship as emergent behaviour rather than a direct consequence of inputs. This framework rejects the assumption that entrepreneurship automatically emerges when capital or skills are introduced. Instead, it recognises that deficiencies in any one behavioural dimension can undermine the entire entrepreneurial process. An individual may possess technical capability but lack confidence, another may have ambition but no understanding of viable business pathways, making entrepreneurship an emergent behaviour shaped by multiple interacting conditions rather than a predictable economic reaction to incentives.

The first dimension, Readiness, refers to the psychological and situational preparedness required to undertake entrepreneurial activity. This includes emotional resilience, confidence, time availability, family support, and willingness to tolerate and adapt to uncertainty. In rural India, readiness is deeply shaped by social structures such as gender norms, caste hierarchies, and family expectations. A rural woman may receive training in tailoring, computer operations, or food processing yet still hesitate to establish a business because domestic responsibilities, mobility restrictions, or patriarchal control limit her ability to act independently. Similarly, entrepreneurs belonging to marginalised communities may face exclusion from traditional market networks or social resistance when attempting to enter certain occupations. Readiness, therefore, is not simply an individual psychological trait but a socially conditioned state shaped by power relations and everyday realities.

Readiness also resonates strongly with the capability approach developed by Amartya Sen, who argued that development should be understood not just in terms of resources but in terms of people’s actual freedoms to pursue lives they value. Sen distinguishes between capabilities and functioning. Individuals may possess capabilities in theory, yet structural and social constraints may prevent them from converting those capabilities into real economic action. The READ framework extends this insight into the domain of entrepreneurship by recognising that the existence of opportunity alone does not guarantee participation.

The second dimension, Exposure, is about the importance of social learning, networks, role models, and market visibility. Entrepreneurship is rarely an isolated individual act, and is deeply influenced by social environments. Individuals often become entrepreneurs because they observe others navigating similar pathways successfully. In many rural communities, however, exposure to growth-oriented enterprises remains extremely limited. People may encounter only subsistence-level economic activity and therefore struggle to imagine entrepreneurship beyond survival-oriented self employment. A young person in a remote village who has never interacted with digital commerce, branding strategies, or scalable enterprises may lack exposure to viable economic possibilities, and not necessarily ambition or intelligence.

Economic sociology has consistently demonstrated the importance of networks in shaping entrepreneurial success. Urban startup ecosystems thrive partly because of dense social environments that provide mentorship, peer learning, investment access, and visible examples of success. Rural entrepreneurship programs often fail to replicate such ecosystems because they focus narrowly on asset distribution or technical training. The READ framework’s emphasis on exposure therefore addresses a major gap in existing development practice. Exposure is not simply informational, as it also creates legitimacy. Seeing people from similar social or economic backgrounds succeed changes what individuals believe is socially and economically possible for themselves.

The third dimension, Aspiration, is socially conditioned and unevenly distributed. Development programs frequently assume that poor households naturally aspire toward upward mobility. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that social structures shape individuals’ ‘horizons of possibility,’ influencing what they perceive as achievable for people like themselves. Similarly, economist Debraj Ray has written extensively about the ‘aspirations window,’ suggesting that exposure to successful peers influences economic ambition and long-term planning.

In many rural contexts, especially among historically marginalised communities, entrepreneurship may not appear imaginable as a pathway to transformation. Young people may aspire primarily toward government employment or urban migration because these trajectories are socially visible and culturally validated. In contrast, business ownership may appear risky, uncertain, or inaccessible. The READ framework recognises that aspiration is not simply a motivational issue but a socially produced cognitive condition. This insight has profound policy implications because it suggests that entrepreneurship promotion requires more than financial support, and often also requires interventions that expand people’s imagination of possible futures.

The fourth dimension, Direction, refers to clarity regarding viable pathways, execution strategies, and market navigation. Many rural entrepreneurs possess determination and ambition but lack strategic guidance. They may not know how to identify profitable sectors, understand customer demand, access supply chains, navigate regulations, price products competitively, or scale operations sustainably. Traditional entrepreneurship programs frequently provide generic training but fail to offer long-term mentoring or strategic support. Participants may learn technical skills without understanding how to build viable enterprises in dynamic market environments.

Direction has become increasingly important in India’s digital economy, where market participation requires familiarity with e-commerce platforms, logistics systems, digital payments, and branding practices. Without adequate guidance, rural entrepreneurs often remain trapped in highly localised, low-margin markets vulnerable to competition and economic shocks. The READ framework’s emphasis on direction therefore highlights the need for sustained mentoring ecosystems rather than one-time training interventions.

The proposed READ framework uses a systems orientation, with an understanding that human behaviour does not operate through isolated causal pathways. Entrepreneurial action emerges from interactions between psychological, social, economic, and institutional conditions. A person may possess high aspiration but lack direction, leading to frustration rather than enterprise creation. Another may have exposure to successful entrepreneurs but insufficient readiness due to household resistance or emotional insecurity. By recognising these interactions, the framework aligns with broader systems-thinking approaches increasingly influential in public policy and development studies.

The framework can prove to be useful when examining women’s entrepreneurship in rural India. Many livelihood programs targeting women measure success primarily through participation rates or loan disbursement numbers. However, women’s formal inclusion in enterprise programs does not necessarily translate into genuine entrepreneurial autonomy. Women may technically own businesses while male family members control decision-making and finances. The READ framework suggests a more nuanced understanding of these realities by examining the behavioural and social conditions surrounding enterprise participation. A woman may receive training and capital yet still lack readiness because of household opposition, exposure because of mobility restrictions, aspiration because of internalised gender norms, or direction because she lacks mentorship networks. This multidimensional perspective provides a richer understanding of why many women-led enterprises remain small-scale and economically vulnerable despite extensive policy attention.

At the same time, the framework raises important conceptual and methodological questions. Behavioural dimensions such as aspiration or readiness are difficult to quantify reliably. Self-reported surveys may suffer from social desirability bias, contextual inconsistencies, or cultural variation. Constructing a robust ‘READ Index’ would therefore require careful psychometric validation and adaptation across diverse social contexts (I am working on defining and designing the Index, and will publish once I am ready). Rural India is not a uniform behavioural landscape, as aspirations, gender norms, and economic expectations vary significantly across regions, castes, religions, and linguistic communities.

Another concern is that behavioural frameworks can unintentionally shift responsibility onto individuals while underemphasizing structural inequalities. Entrepreneurial failure is not always the result of behavioural deficiencies. Infrastructure gaps, poor logistics, corruption, climate shocks, monopolistic market structures, and digital exclusion remain major constraints. A highly motivated entrepreneur with strong exposure and clear direction may still fail because of unreliable electricity, exploitative intermediaries, or lack of transportation infrastructure. Behavioural systems approaches should therefore complement rather than replace structural analysis. Otherwise, there is a risk that development discourse becomes overly individualised, framing poverty as a problem of mindset rather than political economy.

The framework also raises broader questions about the increasing romanticisation of entrepreneurship within contemporary development policy. Entrepreneurship is often presented as a universal solution to unemployment and rural distress. However, not every individual seeks or benefits from entrepreneurial risk. Many rural households prioritise stability and security over growth-oriented enterprise. Excessive emphasis on entrepreneurship can obscure the state’s responsibility to generate decent employment, strengthen public services, and reduce structural inequality. The READ framework has the potential to become most valuable when used as an analytical and program-design tool rather than as an ideological justification for reducing state responsibility.

Despite these concerns, the framework can offer substantial practical relevance for policymakers, NGOs, and development practitioners. If empirically validated, it could reshape the design of rural livelihood programs across India. Interventions could move beyond transactional models toward more relational and behaviourally informed approaches. Programs might assess behavioural readiness before enrollment, create peer-learning ecosystems, facilitate exposure visits, incorporate aspiration-building modules, involve families in sensitisation processes, and provide long-term mentoring rather than short-term training alone. Such approaches would recognise entrepreneurship as a socially embedded process rather than merely an economic activity.

The broader significance of the READ framework is in its attempt to bridge economics, sociology, behavioural science, and development practice. It recognises that poverty is not solely material deprivation but also a condition that shapes agency, imagination, and action. By integrating behavioural insights with systems thinking and capability theory, the framework challenges simplistic assumptions about how development occurs. It asks a deeper question than most entrepreneurship programs currently address, that why do some individuals act on opportunity while others facing similar conditions do not? The answer to that question may be central not only to rural entrepreneurship policy but to the future of inclusive development in India itself.

References

  1. Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Poor Economics, PublicAffairs, 2011.
  2. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press, 1999.
  3. Debraj Ray, Aspirations, Poverty, and Economic Change, Oxford University Press, 2006.
  4. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press, 1977.
  5. World Bank rural population and development indicators.
  6. International Labour Organization reports on informal economies and entrepreneurship.
  7. NITI Aayog policy papers on women entrepreneurship and rural livelihoods.
  8. National Rural Livelihoods Mission (Government of India) operational and policy documents.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the views or opinions of any organization, foundation, CSR, non-profit or others.

The cover image is generated using AI.

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Heart of the Beast

October 5, 2026 1 Comment

Genre: Survival Thriller | Year: 2026 | Duration: 101 mins | Director: David Ayer|  Medium: Theatre (PVR Cinemas) | Trailer: HERE | Language: English| Cast: Brad Pitt, J.K. Simmons, Anna Lambe, and a German Shepherd named Uber | My rating: 4/5

Favourite Dialogue: “What do you say we go find some trouble?”

Heart of the Beast is a survival thriller with exceptional visual storytelling, sparse dialogue, and quieter moments between a former Special Forces officer and his combat dog set in Alaskan wilderness. Add a broken arm, a heart attack, wolves, bears, freezing water, snow, blood and a considerable amount of physical suffering, and you have what appears to be a fairly familiar survival thriller. Yet David Ayer’s film, starring Brad Pitt as James Belmont, turns out to be less interested in survival than in the reason we survive. The core theme is not the wilderness but a relationship between a wounded man and an equally wounded dog who have, in some sense, become each other’s last reason to keep going.

James (Brad Pitt) is a former Special Forces soldier who has travelled to Alaska with Odin, his German Shepherd and former combat companion. Both carry the physical and psychological remnants of war and suffer from PTSD. Odin has lost a leg, while James carries his own injuries and memories. Their retreat into the wilderness initially looks like an attempt at escape, perhaps even healing. But when James’s plane crashes due to a heart attack mid-flight, the landscape that was supposed to offer solitude becomes an obstacle course. The two must make their way back to civilisation across a vast and hostile landscape. The premise is almost elemental with a man, a dog, nature and the distance between life and death.

The film has very few characters and even fewer opportunities for conventional dialogue. J.K. Simmons appears in a small but memorable role, while Anna Lambe has a more peripheral presence. For long stretches, the film belongs almost entirely to James and Odin. The absence of conversation makes every small interaction between the two increasingly important. A look, a gesture, a moment of hesitation or the simple act of the dog following its master begins to carry the emotional weight that another film might try to manufacture through speeches.

And this is where Odin steals the film. Played primarily by a German Shepherd named Uber, Odin is not treated as a cute cinematic accessory. He is a working animal, a veteran, a companion and, eventually, something closer to family. The film avoids turning him into a talking or excessively anthropomorphised dog. He remains recognizably canine, which makes the bond more convincing. Much of the emotional communication between the two comes through glances and physical proximity. The filmmaking is particularly effective here as the combination of Brad Pitt, cinematography, editing and the animal handlers makes Odin’s reactions unusually expressive without forcing them into sentimentality.

Brad Pitt as James is exceptional, and there is little of the easy charm that has defined some of his most recognisable roles. He has very well portrayed James as physically battered, emotionally withdrawn and often barely capable of speaking, and Brad Pitt therefore has communicated this through his posture, exhaustion and facial expression. The result is a performance that depends less on charisma than on vulnerability. 

The film’s treatment of masculinity is also more interesting than its muscular exterior initially suggests. Ayer has made plenty of films about men, violence, soldiers and damaged masculinity, and Heart of the Beast initially appears to belong squarely in that tradition. James is capable, physically tough and accustomed to danger, and knows how to survive. But the film gradually undermines the idea that survival is simply a demonstration of strength. He survives because he cares for something outside himself. His relationship with Odin makes vulnerability possible. The soldier who has been trained to endure pain discovers that endurance is not the same thing as living.

That gives the title an additional resonance. The ‘beast’ gestures towards something inside the characters—the violence, fear and instinct that war has left behind.Heart of the Beast is not a reinvention of the survival movie. Brad Pitt’s weathered performance, the spectacular wilderness, the physical tension and, above all, a remarkably expressive dog steal the show. Its occasional clichés and uneven visual effects prevent it from becoming something deeper or more formally adventurous. But the film understands that emotional power does not always require complexity. Sometimes it requires only two beings refusing to abandon each other. And for a film about survival, that is perhaps the most important thing it has to say.

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What if love became infrastructure 

September 28, 2026 Leave a comment

I got the title (more like borrowed) from a WhatsApp group where a member shared the theme of the ‘At One Impact Week 2026’ conference in Singapore. This one powerful phrase, ‘what if love became infrastructure,’ made me think deeply from romantic and philosophical perspectives initially, and finally from an economist’s viewpoint, and I ended up doing a visioning exercise (sort of) for the future. Ideating and eventually writing this essay took me back down memory lane when I was a student of Social Planning.

We think of infrastructure as something tangible, visible and measurable, like roads, bridges, electricity, water systems, digital networks and financial systems. We know how to calculate their construction costs, estimate their economic returns, and argue over who should pay for them. We even understand that infrastructure can determine the destiny of societies and can alter the trajectory of an entire generation. But there is another infrastructure without which none of these systems ultimately works, and yet it rarely appears in our economic imagination. It is invisible, difficult to measure and almost impossible to commodify. It is love, not romantic love, though that matters too, but the broader human capacity to care, to notice, to remain, to take responsibility for another person’s wellbeing. We have traditionally treated love as a private emotion and have failed to recognise it as a public resource.

Every society runs on enormous quantities of unpaid love, like a parent getting up in the middle of the night for a sick child, or a daughter accompanying an ageing parent to hospital. However, none of these acts is generally counted as economic output. They do not appear in national accounts and are not part of productivity statistics. However, if we remove it altogether, hospitals will become more crowded because there will be nobody to care for people after discharge. Children will require more formal intervention because fewer adults will be available to support them. Elder-care systems will become unaffordable. Workplaces will become less resilient because employees have no one to rely upon outside them. We have created elaborate systems to compensate for the absence of care while rarely acknowledging the care that prevents those systems from collapsing in the first place.

The more efficiently we organise modern economic life, the more we seem to separate it from the relationships that make life worth living. We have become remarkably good at producing things and increasingly uncertain about how to sustain one another. We can deliver almost anything to a doorstep within minutes, but we cannot guarantee that someone will sit beside an elderly person who is lonely. We can communicate instantly with someone on the other side of the planet, but millions of people live without a person they can call when they are frightened. We can build increasingly intelligent machines, but many people struggle to find another human being willing to listen without looking at a screen. The technological revolution has reduced distance while, in some unexpected ways, increased emotional distance. Perhaps this is not a contradiction, and perhaps we simply solved the wrong problem. We became extraordinarily good at connecting devices, markets and information, while leaving the architecture of human connection largely to chance.

If love were infrastructure, loneliness would become an infrastructure deficit. That may sound absurd today, as we are used to thinking of loneliness as a psychological condition, a personal problem or sometimes a consequence of individual choices. But imagine applying the logic we already use elsewhere. If a community has no reliable public transport, we do not tell every resident to become better at walking, instead, we investigate the transport system. If people have no access to clean water, we do not blame them for being thirsty. If an entire generation has inadequate access to education, we do not simply advise young people to become more self-motivated. We build schools and institutions. Why, then, when millions of people experience profound social isolation, do we so quickly individualise the problem? Perhaps some loneliness is personal and inevitable. But some of it is produced by the environments we have built, like cities designed around cars rather than encounters, housing designed around privacy rather than community, workplaces designed around productivity rather than belonging, digital platforms designed around engagement rather than connection, and economic systems that leave people with less time for the relationships they depend upon.

The future city may therefore have to answer a question that today’s urban planning rarely asks if the city make it easy or difficult to belong? A well-designed neighbourhood might not simply be one where people can reach work quickly. It might be one where an elderly person can walk to a park, a child can meet other children, a young professional can enter a community without already knowing someone, and a person living alone has places to go where consumption is not the price of admission. Public libraries, community kitchens, parks, sports facilities, cultural centres, pedestrian streets and shared spaces are not mere amenities but relational infrastructure. Their purpose would be partly to create the conditions under which relationships can emerge naturally. Nobody can be ordered to make a friend. Governments cannot manufacture affection, but governments can certainly create environments in which human beings are more likely to meet one another, spend time together and develop trust.

This would require us to rethink the economics of care. Our economic systems are designed to value what enters markets. Care becomes visible when it is professionalised and paid, like a nurse, childcare worker, therapist, home-care worker, etc. But when the same work is performed by a spouse, parent, sibling, friend or neighbour, its economic value often disappears. What we fail to measure, we tend to underinvest in. And what we underinvest in eventually becomes a crisis. The care economy is therefore not an alternative to the productive economy; rather, it is one of its foundations. Every employee who arrives at work has already been sustained by some network of care. Every entrepreneur has had someone who tolerated their uncertainty. Every successful professional has, somewhere along the way, benefited from someone else’s patience, encouragement, childcare, emotional support or practical help. Economic independence is rarely as independent as we like to imagine.

Perhaps the next stage of capitalism will involve recognising this by redesigning institutions around the reality that people have caring responsibilities. Not by putting a price on love itself, because the moment love becomes a transaction, we risk destroying precisely what makes it valuable. Parental leave, elder care, flexible working, community services and mental-health support are not corporate generosity or welfare expenditure but investments in the infrastructure of human capability. The question would no longer be how much care we can extract from individuals before they burn out, but how we can design economies that reproduce care rather than consume it.

The 20th century built welfare states around the assumption that governments could provide a substantial share of social security. And now, the 21st century is discovering that governments cannot provide human presence, which is increasingly scarce. As populations around the world age and families become smaller, geographically dispersed and increasingly mobile, the question of who will provide everyday human care will become one of the defining social questions of the century.

We are approaching a world in which machines can converse, remember, personalise and simulate empathy with extraordinary sophistication. An AI companion may be available 24 hours a day, never become bored, never interrupt and never judge. For millions of lonely people, this may provide genuine comfort. There is nothing inherently tragic about that. However, if machines become exceptionally good at giving us the feeling of being understood, will we become less willing to tolerate the inconvenience of understanding another human being?

Human relationships are inefficient as they demand time, contain misunderstandings, and require compromise. Other people have needs that compete with ours, and they disappoint us, change, and sometimes even leave. But these inconveniences are not defects in the human system but are more part of what relationships teach us. A machine can perhaps simulate unconditional attention; another human being offers the possibility of mutual responsibility. The challenge for technology, therefore, should not be to replace human relationships but to protect the conditions under which they can flourish. The best AI may ultimately be the AI that saves time for us by reducing bureaucracy for doctors, helping families care for distant parents, assisting teachers, making public services easier to navigate and freeing people from repetitive work. Technology should ideally expand the space available for human presence rather than fill that space itself.

If this sounds utopian, consider how many things that once seemed private have already become legitimate subjects of public policy. We once treated literacy as an individual matter, and now we build education systems. We once treated disease as fate, and now we build healthcare systems. We once treated poverty as personal failure, and now we debate social protection. Our definition of what society owes its members has expanded repeatedly. Perhaps relational wellbeing will be the next frontier.

Imagine a future national wellbeing report that contains a metric nobody takes seriously today: the capacity to care. It might measure how much time people have for family, whether older people have regular social contact, whether young people have trusted adults, how many neighbourhoods possess accessible community spaces, whether workers can take time off for caregiving without economic punishment and whether people feel that they belong somewhere. Imagine a company reporting not only employee turnover but whether its organisational culture leaves people with enough time and psychological capacity to maintain lives outside work. Imagine investors recognising that communities with high levels of trust and social connection are more resilient in crises. These ideas may sound soft compared with infrastructure spending today. But history repeatedly demonstrates that societies often collapse because the relationships holding them together become brittle.

Love, in this broader sense, is demanding and requires boundaries, accountability and difficult choices. A society organised around love would not be one in which everyone agrees with everyone else or where harm is excused because the perpetrator is human. It would be one in which disagreement does not automatically turn the other person into an enemy, where vulnerability does not become a source of shame and where the dignity of a person is not entirely dependent on their economic usefulness. It would ask a different and radical political question: What do we owe one another?

Perhaps this is where the idea of love as infrastructure becomes most disruptive. Infrastructure is usually associated with physical capital, but civilisation also accumulates relational capital, like trust, friendship, community, reputation and reciprocity. The ability to call someone in a crisis is a form of wealth. Knowing that someone will notice when you disappear is a form of security. Having people who will help you when your circumstances change is resilience. These things are not equally distributed. Some people inherit enormous reservoirs of relational capital through families, communities and social networks, while others inherit almost none. We talk endlessly about inequality of income and increasingly about inequality of opportunity. Perhaps it’s time we should also talk about inequality of belonging.

The most interesting possibility is that love may eventually become a new way of thinking about development itself. It will be a recognition that human beings are profoundly relational creatures and that any civilisation that ignores this will eventually pay for it through other systems like healthcare, welfare, policing, education, mental-health services and lost productivity. What we fail to provide through relationships, we eventually attempt to provide through institutions, often at vastly greater cost.

And perhaps the deepest irony is that we already know how to build this infrastructure. We do not need a revolutionary technology. We need to rediscover ordinary human practices that modern life has made increasingly difficult, like sitting with someone, listening without checking the phone, knowing the names of neighbours, sharing food, visiting the elderly, creating public spaces where nobody needs to buy anything, giving people time to care, allowing friendships to develop slowly and treating presence as something valuable rather than unproductive. The infrastructure of love is built in minutes, conversations, gestures and acts of attention. 

When we imagine the future, we tend to imagine what technology will allow us to do. Perhaps a more important question is what technology will allow us to stop doing, and what we will choose to do with the time we recover. If AI does our paperwork, who will we visit? If autonomous vehicles drive us, who will we meet on the journey? If machines educate our children, who will teach them how to care? If algorithms know our preferences better than our friends do, will we still make the effort to know one another?

The future will not be short of infrastructure. It may, however, be short of reasons to use it together. Perhaps the civilisation that comes after ours will judge progress differently. It may look back at our obsession with highways, buildings, bandwidth, productivity and growth and wonder why we spent so much effort making things faster while allowing relationships to become harder. It may find it strange that we measured national wealth but not the wealth of human connection, counted houses but not homes, calculated healthcare expenditure but ignored the unpaid care that kept millions alive, and celebrated technological connectivity while tolerating extraordinary levels of loneliness. And perhaps the great infrastructure revolution of the future will begin with a deceptively simple realisation that the purpose of infrastructure is not to connect roads, machines, markets or data, but to enable human beings to live meaningful lives together.

(The cover image is generated using AI)

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Before the Coffee Gets Cold

September 21, 2026 Leave a comment

Author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi |Translated by Geoffrey Trousselot| 224 Pages | Genre: Fiction | Publisher: Picador | Year: 2019 | My Rating: 8.5/10

” When you go back, no matter how hard you try, the present won’t change”
― Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Before the Coffee Gets Cold

The novel was originally published in Japan in 2015 and translated into English by Geoffrey Trousselot in 2019. The novel was also adapted into a film, Café Funiculi Funicula, which was released in Japan in 2018 and directed by Ayuko Tsukahara. Before the Coffee Gets Cold is an adaptation of a stage play. Kawaguchi was a playwright, and the original story was written for the theatre before being adapted into a novel. The theatrical influence remains visible throughout the book, with ‘clang-dong’ written as a scene shift as characters arrive and leave the cafe. Almost everything happens in one enclosed space where the characters enter, sit, talk, listen, and leave. The narrative is carried by dialogue. The result is a novel that sometimes feels less like conventional fiction than like a collection of intimate dramatic scenes.

The story is set in a small café in Tokyo, Funiculi Funicula, where a customer can travel into the past. There are rules, of course, as one must sit in a particular chair; one may meet only people who have visited the café; nothing said or done in the past can alter the present; and the traveller must return before the coffee becomes cold. The café is therefore less a machine for travelling through time than a chamber for confronting memory. The novel doesn’t have altered timelines, paradoxes, dystopian futures, or battles with destiny. The supernatural mechanism is deliberately narrow, where the past is sealed, and the future remains untouched. Only the traveller’s understanding of what happened can change, and time becomes another technology of human agency.

Kawaguchi is less interested in the mechanics of time travel than in its emotional residue. This novel is about the strange human wish to return to a moment in personal history, in which a conversation that ended a relationship, the apology that was never made, the goodbye that was too hurried, the person whose absence has become more real than their presence ever was. The café does not offer a second chance in the conventional sense. It offers something both smaller and, perhaps, more difficult chance to see the past without being able to repair it. The novel proposes that regret is not necessarily a desire to alter history. Sometimes regret is simply the recognition that we misunderstood history when we were living through it.

The novel’s emotional world is built from ordinary disappointments in life rather than extraordinary tragedies. The narrative follows four distinct visitors: Fumiko, who wishes to speak with the boyfriend who left her; Kohtake, a nurse seeking a letter from her Alzheimer’s-stricken husband, Fusagi; Yaeko, a bar owner mourning a final conversation with her late sister; and Kei, the café owner’s ailing wife who travels to the future to see her unborn daughter. Assisted by the quiet barista Kazu, the cheerful owner Nagare, and a quiet Ghost of a woman who guards the chair, these characters learn that while they cannot alter the present reality, the act of expressing their true feelings completely transforms their hearts and gives them the strength to face the future.

The brilliance of the café’s rules is that they remove the fantasy of control. In most stories about time travel, the past is a problem to be solved. Go back far enough, and one can prevent the accident, save the relationship, kill the tyrant, invest in the right company, or avoid whatever mistake has subsequently become intolerable. Time in the novel is not represented by a clock or some abstract metaphysical force. Instead, it is represented by a cup of steaming coffee and measured by the cup gradually losing its heat. The travellers to their past have only until the coffee becomes cold. The deadline is arbitrary, intimate, almost domestic, and yet it transforms the familiar cup of coffee into a measure of mortality. We have all experienced versions of this deadline. A conversation that we postpone, a phone call that we assume can be made tomorrow, parents we intend to visit during holidays, a friend we imagine will always be there, a relationship we believe has time to repair itself.

The characters who enter the café are not given additional time in any meaningful quantitative sense. They are given a few minutes. What changes is the quality of those minutes. The past becomes suddenly precious because the characters know precisely how little time they possess. Kawaguchi turns the familiar fantasy of ‘more time’ into better attention to the time already available. The novel asks its characters, and by extension its readers, to accept that the past cannot be changed. But it also constructs an elaborate fantasy in which people can return to the past precisely because they cannot bear to leave it alone. Acceptance is rarely achieved by simply deciding to accept. We revisit memories, replay conversations, imagine alternative sentences in our minds. We wonder what would have happened if we had arrived five minutes earlier or stayed five minutes longer. Kawaguchi’s café gives physical form to this universal mental habit. Kawaguchi ultimately asks a question that is simpler than its time travel premise and harder to answer: ‘If you were given one last conversation with someone you had lost, what would you say?’

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