"Just be more confident" ignores that confidence is downstream of having been right in front of people a few times, and nobody can give you that. You can only be handed the room, and whoever is giving the advice is usually the one who decides who gets the room.

Years of reading about the Grenfell inquiry, on and off, and the thing that has stayed with me is not the cladding. It is that everybody involved was following a process. The manufacturers tested to a standard. The certifiers certified against the standard. The contractors specified a product that held a certificate. The building control officers checked the certificate existed. At every single link somebody did the thing their role required, and the result was a building that burned in a way everyone had been told was impossible. That is much more frightening than corruption. Corruption you can find and remove. A system where every participant discharges their duty correctly and the aggregate is catastrophic has no villain to sack, and no obvious repair. The inquiry's recommendations are mostly more checks, and I do not know what else they could have been. But every one of them adds a person who will be able to say, honestly, that they did their part.

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

Everyone I know is one broken boiler away from a genuinely bad month and we have all agreed not to bring it up.

Music got worse when it got easy to make — not the songs, the filter. When a studio cost real money somebody had to believe in you before you got in the room.

Saying the uncomfortable thing is usually the kind option, and almost nobody does it, because the discomfort arrives immediately and the kindness turns up months later.

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.

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.

Walking is free, works for nearly everybody, and has no equipment attached, which is exactly why you never hear about it.

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

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

Everyone I know is on their phone in bed and everyone I know is tired. I am not saying it is causal. I am saying it is a hell of a coincidence.

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.

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.

The number of people I know who have quietly cut something out of their diet and never mentioned it to a doctor is, now I think about it, most of them.

Am I the only one who finds "quiet luxury" is just expensive clothes for people who got embarrassed about logos?

Cricket commentary has got unbearable. Nobody describes anything any more, they just wait for a stat to read out.

Half the arguments I have with my partner are about the same four things and we have never once finished one. I am not sure that is a problem, which is new.

Meetings are not the problem. Nobody distinguishing a meeting for deciding from a meeting for informing is the problem. Half the frustration in any organisation is people arriving in different modes and spending an hour discovering it, then booking a follow-up to do the thing they came to do.

A thing about friendship after about thirty that I do not think anybody warns you about. It stops happening by default. School, university and your first job all put you in a room with the same people repeatedly for years, and every friendship you have was quietly manufactured by that. Then it stops, and the machinery goes with it, and nobody tells you because the people it has already happened to have stopped noticing. What replaces it is admin. You have to want it enough to put a date in a calendar six weeks out, and then to still want it on the night, which after a full week is a genuinely different question. The friendships that survive are not the deepest ones. They are the ones where somebody was willing to do the admin. I find that slightly bleak and also I have made my peace with it. The alternative was assuming it was about me, and it took about four years to work out that it was structural. Everyone I have said this to since has said some version of yes, and then said they thought it was just them.

A backdoor for one government is a backdoor for everyone, and this is arithmetic rather than politics. A key that exists can be stolen.

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.

The replication crisis never really ended, we just stopped finding it interesting.

Self-driving is a much harder problem than anyone selling it admits. The driving was never the bit — it is the one situation in ten thousand that nobody wrote a rule for.

Running a car costs most people about four hundred a month once you count everything, and almost nobody has ever counted everything.