Anyone else notice that every "wellness" thing at work is something that would be unnecessary if the job were slightly less bad?

Every interface is now designed to be learned once and never thought about, which is wonderful until the day it does something you did not ask for.

The first time I earned more than my father had, and what it was actually like. I had been quietly aiming at it for years without ever saying so. Then it happened, on an ordinary Tuesday, and the thing I felt was not pride. It was a sort of vertigo — the number had been a fixed point my whole life, the thing a household ran on, and now it was just a figure I had passed. What I had not expected is that it changes the conversation permanently and in one direction. He cannot ask me for advice, because that would be an admission. I cannot offer it, because that would be worse. So we talk about the car and the garden, and the one subject where I could actually be useful is the one we have both silently agreed to leave alone. I do not think either of us is handling it badly. I think there is no way to handle it. The money was never the thing that was being measured, and finding that out did not help as much as I assumed it would.

Everybody is tired and nobody can say precisely of what, and I think that is the actual condition rather than a symptom of one.

Every health app I have tried eventually becomes a thing I am failing at rather than a thing that helps.

Search has got noticeably worse and I have started adding the name of a forum to the end of every query, which is a strange thing to have to do in 2026.

Youth sport got professionalised and the result is ten year olds with strength programmes and nobody left to make up the numbers on a Sunday.

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

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.

Every job I have had contained about four hours of real work a day and an enormous amount of theatre around it.

Public transport should be judged on whether it is usable by someone with a pram, a suitcase and a bad knee — not on its top speed. Every network that passes that test turns out to be pleasant for everyone else too, and almost every network that fails it was designed around a commuter who is twenty-eight and carrying a laptop.

Genuine question: can anyone name a single thing their MP has done? Not voted for. Done.

T20 made Test cricket better, not worse, and the people who say otherwise have not watched a fourth innings run chase lately.

Nostalgia for early internet culture ignores that it was small, homogeneous and mostly male, and that almost everything people miss about it was a property of being small. Two hundred people can hold a norm in their heads without writing it down. Nothing about that survives contact with two million.

Being poor is expensive and nobody tells you until you are in it. Cheap shoes twice a year, the meter that costs more per unit, the deposit you cannot save because you are paying someone else's mortgage.

Nobody budgets for the thing that actually ruins a month, because the thing that ruins a month is never in the categories.

Nobody knows what to do with an afternoon any more. Give most people four unplanned hours and they will tidy something.

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

We should be spending vastly more on stopping the next pandemic, and we will not, because prevention has no photograph attached to it.

Most of what psychology published before about 2015 does not replicate, and the field has been much more graceful about admitting it than any other would have been.

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.

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.

Cities that solved housing did it by building an unremarkable amount of unremarkable housing for a very long time, which is why nobody can point to a dramatic example. The absence of a dramatic case is the finding, and it is also the politics: a policy whose costs are immediate and local and whose payoff is twenty years out is the hardest thing an elected person can attempt.

Peer review does more harm than good at this point. Two anonymous strangers, no accountability, eighteen months, and a result nobody will ever try to reproduce.

A thing I have noticed after fifteen years of interviewing people: almost every interview process is measuring how comfortable someone is being evaluated, and then reporting that as a measure of how good they are at the job. The tell is that the same candidate performs completely differently depending on the room. Give someone a whiteboard and three strangers and you learn how they handle being watched. Give them a real problem and an afternoon and you learn something about how they think. These correlate weakly, and we have built an entire industry on assuming they correlate strongly. What makes it hard to fix is that the noisy signal is cheap and the good signal is expensive. An hour of whiteboarding costs an hour. A realistic work sample costs a day of the candidate's time and half a day of yours, and multiplied across a funnel that is a real budget line that somebody has to defend. So we keep the cheap test and then add stages to compensate for its noise, which is how a process ends up with six rounds that are each individually indefensible. I do not have a clean answer. I have stopped pretending the current thing measures what we say it measures.