Right now, billions of people are doing the same thing.

Watching. Hoping. Gasping. Celebrating.
Some are devastated. Others are delirious.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is underway — and whatever your relationship with football, underneath the result, something remarkable is happening.

Here’s a thought I keep returning to:

None of us is special. But each of us is unique.

Around 108 billion humans have walked this Earth.

Each one shaped by a different combination of place, DNA, time, language, loss, and Love.

And right now, millions of those unique individuals — from São Paulo to Seoul, from Lagos to London — are all leaning toward the same screen.

That’s not nothing, that matters.

I call it a Collective Pulse.
Those rare windows when humanity, for all its fractures, beats together.

The World Cup has always been that.

A grandmother in South Africa. A teenager in Norway. A kid in Brazil. A Grandfather in a pub in Dublin. None of them special. All of them unique.

Sharing the same held breath before a penalty.

No translation needed.

What strikes me, though, is the choice we face in how we hold it.

We can tune into the tribalism — the “us vs them” that sport can amplify.

Or we can tune into something quieter, but just as real:

strangers becoming friends in a stadium,

flags draped across unfamiliar shoulders,

shared heartbreak when a team goes home.

There’s a phrase we often use in YQ:
What we tune into shapes what we see.

Right now, some people are using the World Cup to divide. To mock. To score points off the wrong kind of scoreboard.

But there are just as many — more, I believe — who are using it as a reason to connect. To belong, if only for a few weeks. To be simply human.

I don’t know what the next chapter of our world looks like.

But I know this: any time billions of unique human beings — none of them special, all of them irreplaceable — gather around the same fire, even a virtual one…

…something in us remembers what we’re capable of.

The question isn’t whether the world can pull together.

The question is whether we choose to notice when it does.

I’ll come back to this when the final whistle blows.

By then, we’ll have our answer.