Everybody under thirty-five I know treats owning a home as roughly as likely as winning something, and talks about it in the same tone.

We have lost the ability to be mildly interested in something. It is either your whole personality or you have not heard of it.

My handwriting has become genuinely illegible and I only found out because I had to fill in a form in front of somebody.

If you could only fix one, fix your sleep, not your exercise. Nobody wants to hear it because you cannot post about sleeping.

Small talk gets a terrible press, mostly from people who have never had to sit next to a stranger for two hours.

A thing I cannot resolve about giving money to people begging. The argument against is well rehearsed and mostly correct: it may fund an addiction, it does not address the cause, the money would do more good given to an organisation set up to help, and the impulse is partly about how it makes me feel rather than what it does. The argument for is much shorter and I keep finding it harder to dismiss. Someone in front of me has asked for something I can trivially provide, and every framework I use to say no is a framework I constructed after the fact, sitting comfortably somewhere else. What I actually do is inconsistent — sometimes yes, sometimes no, and the variable is mostly my mood and how much of a hurry I am in, which is the worst possible basis. I would rather hold either position honestly than keep operating a policy that is really just weather.

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.

The algorithm has quietly killed the thing where you find something you were not looking for. Every recommendation is a slightly worse version of what I already like.

I have started going to bed at the same time every night like a child and it has been more effective than every other thing I have tried combined.

Every device I own wants to update itself at the exact moment I need it. I do not think this is bad luck any more.

We built an entire economy on the idea that people will keep buying things they already have, and then act surprised when the things are designed to stop working.

Sport is the last mainstream thing where the outcome is genuinely unknown to everyone watching, and that scarcity explains most of what it costs. Everything else in the culture now arrives pre-summarised, already reacted to, and with the ending available before you start. The live unknown is what the broadcast money is really buying.

I have started saying no to things eleven months in advance and it turns out absolutely nothing happens.

Nobody tells you that recovering from something takes about three times longer than the leaflet says, and that the last third is almost entirely boredom.

You can love the work of someone appalling. I have never once met a person who manages it consistently, but in principle you can.

Calling it phone addiction misses it. Most people are bored at work, and the phone is the only thing that isn't.

The best decisions get made quickly. The ones that drag on for months usually dragged because nobody wanted to say the obvious thing out loud.

That dentistry sits outside the NHS is the strangest line anyone has ever drawn through a human body. Teeth are in there. They hurt. Nobody can explain it.

Voting for the least bad option is not cynicism, it is the entire mechanism working as designed, and I have got tired of being told otherwise.

Try watching a match with the commentary off. It is a completely different sport and you notice about twice as much.

Something I keep coming back to and cannot resolve, about the NHS specifically. Dealing with it is slow, repetitive and frequently maddening. You give the same information four times. You wait on a line. You are asked to confirm a date of birth by three separate people in one building. Nobody who has used it recently would describe the experience as pleasant. And I trust it completely, in a way I do not trust any organisation that has ever been pleasant to me. I think those two things are connected rather than coincidental. It has to be procedural because the procedure is the accountability — the repetition is a check, the wait is a queue somebody is being fair about, and the four separate confirmations exist because getting it wrong is unacceptable rather than merely bad for retention. Which leaves me unable to answer the obvious question. When somebody says the NHS should be "more like Amazon", what exactly are they asking for? Because I cannot tell whether the pleasant part can be separated from the part that owes you nothing.

Shah rukh is indeed the last of the stars. Prove me wrong ✌🏻

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.

Everyone has become an amateur nutritionist about their own dog.

Podcasts are radio with the editing taken out and we have agreed to call that intimacy.