We know more about the surface of Mars than the floor of our own ocean and that is a genuinely strange set of priorities.

Honestly think the four-day week debate is mostly people who already have autonomy arguing about the calendar, while everyone in a warehouse gets nothing out of either version.

Buying a house is the only serious purchase where you bid against a number nobody will show you, and everyone has agreed to find this normal.

The best thing about a newspaper was that it ended. You got to the back page and you were done and nobody suggested anything else.

Most "we need better communication" is really "somebody needs to make a decision and nobody wants to be the one who did".

Nobody finishes books and we have all quietly agreed to lie about it.

Football has too much football now.

Can we talk about the specific misery of a group chat trying to decide where to eat? Six people, all of whom have a preference, none of whom will state it first. Somebody offers a place. Two react with a thumbs up, which means nothing. One says "I'm easy!" which is a lie. The person who actually wanted Thai says nothing, because saying it now would look like overruling. Ninety minutes pass. You end up at the place nobody chose, which everyone privately rates about a six. The thing is that this is not a coordination problem, it is a status problem. Everyone knows the fastest solution is one person deciding. What nobody wants is to be the person who decided, because then the evening is theirs, and if the food is mediocre it is their fault. The only fix I have found is somebody booking it before the chat starts. Not suggesting — booking. Nobody has ever objected, which rather gives the game away: it was never that people disagreed, it was that nobody wanted to own it.

Lower league football is better to attend and worse to watch, and the people who only do one of those never believe the other.

Ask a city what it wants and it says better public transport. Ask about the bus and the room goes quiet. The bus is the only bit that is affordable, deliverable this decade and actually useful to people without money — and it is the one thing no city gets excited about announcing.

Being good at your job and being good at describing your job are almost completely unrelated skills, and only one of them gets promoted.

I have started saying "I don't know" out loud in meetings and conversations and it has been quietly transformative, which I did not expect.

Every company I have joined has a three week onboarding plan and the actual onboarding is one person who has been there six years and answers questions. Nobody has ever written that person into the plan.

Job hopping is the only reliable pay rise and companies have nobody to blame but themselves. Three percent internally, twenty percent to leave, every year, forever.

Cities that solved housing did it by building an unremarkable amount of unremarkable housing for a very long time, which is why nobody can point to a dramatic example. The absence of a dramatic case is the finding, and it is also the politics: a policy whose costs are immediate and local and whose payoff is twenty years out is the hardest thing an elected person can attempt.

I have stopped believing any product review I read and I do not have a replacement, which is a genuinely new situation.

Nobody says out loud that getting fitter in your forties is mostly about being willing to be bad at something in public.

I've come round to thinking most productivity advice is just a way of feeling organised for about a week.

A pay rise disappears in about four months and nobody warns you. You adjust, the new number becomes normal, and you are back where you started with a bigger flat.

Living in a city is greener than living in the countryside, which reliably annoys everyone who moved out for the fresh air.

Search has got noticeably worse and I have started adding the name of a forum to the end of every query, which is a strange thing to have to do in 2026.

I cannot do a phone call any more and I genuinely do not know when that happened.

Nobody knows what to do with an afternoon any more. Give most people four unplanned hours and they will tidy something.

The honest reason I have not switched energy supplier, bank or insurer is that it is dull, and the entire industry is built on exactly that.

A thing about going to the doctor that took me far too long to work out. For years I went in and described my symptoms in the order they had bothered me, which is the order they occurred to me, which is almost exactly the wrong order. The thing I was most worried about came last, usually in the doorway, usually prefixed with "oh, and probably nothing, but". What changed it was a GP who interrupted me about forty seconds in and asked what I was actually frightened of. I said it out loud, she dealt with it in two minutes, and the remaining eight were useful for the first time in my adult life. I now write down one sentence before I go in, which is the thing I am afraid of, and I say it first. I am aware this sounds like a productivity tip for being ill. It has changed every appointment I have had since.