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

Films are too long. Not artistically, logistically — I have children and a bus to catch.

The state of the roads is the most politically radicalising thing in this country and nobody in national politics has noticed.

Cookie banners were meant to give people control and have instead taught an entire continent to click the nearest button without reading anything. We have trained a reflex, not a decision.

Watching your team lose is a better test of whether you like the sport than watching them win.

Everyone has become an amateur nutritionist about their own dog.

We keep calling it a housing crisis like it's weather.

We treat mental health at work like it is about resilience training when it is mostly about workload and whether your manager is a decent person.

Every winter the entire country gets the same cough and we have all agreed to describe it as "something going round".

First past the post keeps producing governments that most people voted against, and we keep describing this as stability.

I miss being unreachable and I am aware I could simply turn the phone off, and I am also aware that I will not.

I started leaving my phone in another room and I feel slightly deranged about how much better it is. That cannot be right. It is a phone.

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

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.

Reading a hard book slowly is not the same activity as reading an easy book slowly, and treating them as one thing is why reading targets are useless. Counting books is like counting meals — the number is accurate and it tells you almost nothing about whether anything was absorbed.

We will still be typing passwords in ten years. We have been promised their death for two decades and I am still resetting one most weeks.

Hot take: the reason nobody trusts polls any more isn't that polls got worse. It's that we started reading them as predictions instead of measurements, and then blamed them for failing at a job they never claimed to do.

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.

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.

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

Sequels have not got worse. We got older, and no film is ever going to land on you the way one did when you were fourteen.

What I actually miss is software that was finished. You bought it, it did the thing, and nobody moved the buttons on a Thursday.

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

Software has got worse. Everything is a web page in a costume now — slower to open, does less, and it wants an account before it will tell you the time.

Startups are a worse deal for employees than they were ten years ago. Same hours, same risk, a much thinner slice, and the exit that justified it happens far less often.