Most people would be happier with fewer options. Ask anyone who has spent forty minutes scrolling and then rewatched something they had already seen twice.

Weather forecasting got quietly, enormously better and nobody noticed because we only remember the times it was wrong.

Nobody I know under forty mentions a pension and nobody over fifty talks about anything else. There is no middle period where it gradually comes up. One day it is simply the topic.

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

Home advantage is mostly the crowd, and the empty-stadium seasons proved it — it shrank, it did not vanish, and what was left was travel and the referee.

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.

Subtitles on, always. I don't care that it supposedly means my hearing is going — I catch about a third more of what is actually said.

"Trauma" now stretches from genocide to a bad line manager, and somewhere in that stretch the word stopped doing any work at all.

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

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

The best manager I ever had appeared to do almost nothing. It took me three years to work out that was the job.

Antibiotic resistance is the slowest emergency we have and being slow is the entire problem. Nothing that takes thirty years to arrive ever gets a budget.

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.

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

"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.

Ambition gets treated as a virtue and I am not convinced. Half the ambitious people I know are mainly frightened of turning out ordinary.

The four-day week only really works if your job is thinking. Every pilot anyone quotes was an office, and nobody ever ran one in a warehouse.

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.

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.

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

Remote work did not fail. Managers who could only manage by looking at people failed, and remote work is what made that visible. Four years on, the teams that kept it are the ones that already wrote things down, and the teams that abandoned it are mostly the ones that never did.

AI is going to destroy more jobs than it makes. Every previous wave moved people up a ladder; this one is coming for the rungs.

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

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.

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