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

Open source got quietly captured by the companies it was supposed to be an escape from. Most of the big projects are staffed by people on three payrolls now, and the licence is the only part that still looks independent.

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

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.

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

Test cricket is the only sport where the boring bit is the point and I will not be taking questions.

We built an entire economy on the idea that people will keep buying things they already have, and then act surprised when the things are designed to stop working.

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.

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.

"Free delivery" is not free and we all know it is not free and we all still pick it, which I think says something slightly embarrassing about all of us.

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

Football has too much football now.

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

Everything is a franchise now and the honest reason is that an unknown thing is a risk somebody has to personally sign off on.

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

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.

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

I want to defend something unfashionable, which is meetings that could have been an email. Sometimes the point of the meeting is not the information. It is that eight people are now jointly aware that they all heard the same thing at the same time, and nobody can later claim a different understanding. That is expensive and it is doing real work. The email version saves forty minutes and produces eight private interpretations, four of which are wrong and none of which surface until something breaks. Then you spend a great deal more than forty minutes finding out which four. I am not defending the recurring status meeting nobody has questioned since 2019. I am saying the calculation is not "was information transferred" — it is "did we need shared knowledge that everyone knows everyone else has", and for anything contested the answer is usually yes.

Open-plan schools, hospital targets and the gig economy will look like the same idea wearing three hats — measure the throughput, ignore the thing being thrown through.

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.

Being good at your job and being good at describing your job are almost completely unrelated skills, and only one of them gets promoted.

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

Meetings are not the problem. Nobody distinguishing a meeting for deciding from a meeting for informing is the problem. Half the frustration in any organisation is people arriving in different modes and spending an hour discovering it, then booking a follow-up to do the thing they came to do.

Most productivity advice is survivorship bias with a system bolted on. Setting the system up feels like work, which is the whole appeal.