A pay rise disappears in about four months and nobody warns you. You adjust, the new number becomes normal, and you are back where you started with a bigger flat.

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.

That dentistry sits outside the NHS is the strangest line anyone has ever drawn through a human body. Teeth are in there. They hurt. Nobody can explain 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.

Tipping has quietly become a thing you do for a screen rather than a person, and I notice I resent it far more.

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

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.

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

I have started saying no to things eleven months in advance and it turns out absolutely nothing happens.

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

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.

Nuclear is the safest energy we have per unit generated, and thirty years of being squeamish about it is a large part of why we are still burning gas.

Denzel curry is better than lil dicky. They're not even in the same league

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

We know more about the surface of Mars than the floor of our own ocean and that is a genuinely strange set of priorities.

For most software engineers a degree stopped being worth what it costs. It is now mainly a filter that employers use because filtering is expensive.

Nothing is allowed to be medium-sized any more. Everything is either a phenomenon or it failed.

Shah rukh is indeed the last of the stars. Prove me wrong ✌🏻

Weddings have got completely out of hand and everybody involved seems to be having a worse time than they would at a decent party.

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.

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.

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.

Nobody actually likes standing desks. We all just got told sitting was killing us and now we're too embarrassed to sit back down.

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.

Every organisation says it wants honest feedback and has exactly one person who gives it, and that person is always halfway out the door.