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.

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

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

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.

Index funds have made markets less efficient — half the money in the room is now buying without an opinion about anything.

Cookie banners were meant to give people control and have instead taught an entire continent to click the nearest button without reading anything. We have trained a reflex, not a decision.

A thing I cannot resolve about giving money to people begging. The argument against is well rehearsed and mostly correct: it may fund an addiction, it does not address the cause, the money would do more good given to an organisation set up to help, and the impulse is partly about how it makes me feel rather than what it does. The argument for is much shorter and I keep finding it harder to dismiss. Someone in front of me has asked for something I can trivially provide, and every framework I use to say no is a framework I constructed after the fact, sitting comfortably somewhere else. What I actually do is inconsistent — sometimes yes, sometimes no, and the variable is mostly my mood and how much of a hurry I am in, which is the worst possible basis. I would rather hold either position honestly than keep operating a policy that is really just weather.

Films are too long. Not artistically, logistically — I have children and a bus to catch.

Ask anyone whether they want the truth from their doctor and they say yes, then go to pieces the moment a doctor is actually blunt with them.

Small talk gets a terrible press, mostly from people who have never had to sit next to a stranger for two hours.

Nobody tells you that recovering from something takes about three times longer than the leaflet says, and that the last third is almost entirely boredom.

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

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

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

Nobody finishes books and we have all quietly agreed to lie about it.

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

First past the post keeps producing governments that most people voted against, and we keep describing this as stability.

Won on the science, lost on the sequencing: almost nobody disputes the physics any more, and almost everybody disputes who pays first. Which means another decade spent explaining the greenhouse effect is a decade spent answering a question that stopped being asked.

Everyone I know is one broken boiler away from a genuinely bad month and we have all agreed not to bring it up.

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

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.

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

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

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

Music got worse when it got easy to make — not the songs, the filter. When a studio cost real money somebody had to believe in you before you got in the room.