Statistics should be taught instead of trigonometry. I have needed one of them roughly weekly since school and the other precisely never.

Remote work has made engineering teams worse, and the bit that broke is the part nobody wrote down: juniors learning by overhearing.

Sport is the only place left where we are collectively fine with someone being obviously, measurably better than everyone else, and I find it interesting that we cannot tolerate that anywhere else.

Most political arguments look like disagreements about facts and are really disagreements about what matters. The first kind can be settled. Nobody in history has settled the second by producing a better statistic.

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.

The best thing about going to a match is the twenty minutes before anything happens, and no broadcast has ever worked out how to show it.

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.

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.

Every popular fact you know about the brain is either wrong or from 1985. The ten percent thing, left brain right brain, learning styles, all of it, still being taught by people who mean well.

Group chats replaced forums and we lost the thing where a stranger's answer from four years ago was still there when you needed it.

A cricket match that ends in a draw is a better result than most wins and this is the single hardest thing to explain to anyone who did not grow up with it.

Splitting the bill evenly is a tax on whoever ordered the salad, and everyone knows it, and everyone does it anyway because saying so costs more than the difference.

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.

We are going to spend the next ten years discovering which parts of the internet were being held together by people doing it for free.

Nobody has ever explained to me why we accept that a phone lasts three years.

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.

I have never regretted spending money on a good mattress or decent shoes. Almost everything else I have regretted.

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

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.

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

Every complaint about immigration in my town is actually a complaint about not being able to get a GP appointment, and both parties have found it easier to argue about the first one.

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

Running is boring and that is the entire point. Every attempt to make exercise entertaining has produced something people stop doing in March.

Everyone I know who is good with money either earns a lot or was quietly given something early. The budgeting apps are for the rest of us to feel busy with.

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.