Getting a GP appointment has become a competitive sport and the people who are worst at sport are the ones who need it most.

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

Every government IT project fails the same way and everybody involved can describe the failure in advance, which is the part I cannot get past.

Every messaging app eventually turns into a bad email client. Threads, then search, then folders, then somebody adds a rules engine and we are right back where we started.

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.

A university degree is now mostly a signal about who your parents were, and only incidentally about what you know. The tell is that employers screen on institution rather than transcript, and institution is set by admissions, which is set by schooling, which is set by money.

Genuine question: has anyone actually changed their mind because of something they read online? Not softened, not "considered" — changed.

Nobody prepares you for the phone call where your parent becomes the person who needs looking after. It does not arrive as a diagnosis. It arrives as a series of small things you decide individually not to worry about — a missed bill, the same story twice, a car with a scrape nobody mentions. Each one is fine. You notice the pattern about eight months after it started. What I was not ready for is that there is no moment where anybody tells you it has changed. No appointment, no letter. You simply find yourself doing more of the phoning and more of the deciding, and one day you realise the direction reversed some time ago and nobody said. The practical stuff I could handle. What I could not was that he knew too, and was managing it, and that both of us spent about a year protecting the other from a conversation we were separately already having.

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

Try watching a match with the commentary off. It is a completely different sport and you notice about twice as much.

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.

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

Every generation gets told it is uniquely bad at attention, and every generation was in fact being sold something new that was uniquely good at taking it. Novels, radio, television, phones. I do not think the people were ever the variable.

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.

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.

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.

Something I have thought about a lot since I started managing people, which nobody warned me about: you cannot tell someone they are underperforming in a way that does not change the relationship permanently. I do not mean they resent you, though sometimes they do. I mean that afterwards, every ordinary interaction has a second layer. You ask how the weekend was and they are checking whether you are asking because you are being normal, or because you are softening something. That layer does not go away when the performance improves. It just gets quieter. I still think you have to do it. Letting someone carry on failing is worse, and the version where you say nothing and then act surprised at review time is the genuinely unkind option. But I have stopped pretending it is a neutral conversation that a good manager can have without cost. It costs something every time, and the honest thing is to spend it deliberately rather than believe the technique makes it free.

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.

Most people who say they "believe in science" mean they trust institutions, which is a completely different thing and much easier to break.

unpopular opinion but most "food deserts" are actually time deserts. the shop is there, people are working two jobs.

A genuine question for anyone who did science at school more recently than me: how much of what I was taught has quietly been revised? Nobody sends an update.

I cannot do a phone call any more and I genuinely do not know when that happened.

Polarisation gets the blame, but the lasting damage from social media might be flattening — every subject arrives at the same size, in the same box, with the same three reactions available, whether it is a war or a sandwich.

Cash is going and I notice I spend more without it, which is embarrassing but seems to be true of nearly everybody I ask.

Olympic sports get worse as they get more professional. What people actually miss is the amateurism, and it turns out that was most of the charm.