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

Calling it phone addiction misses it. Most people are bored at work, and the phone is the only thing that isn't.

Nobody has a local team any more, they have a team, and the difference turns out to matter.

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

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.

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

How somebody looks after their own body is nobody else's business. Not mine, not yours, not their colleague's, not a stranger's on the internet.

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

Watching your team lose is a better test of whether you like the sport than watching them win.

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.

We keep calling it a housing crisis like it's weather.

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.

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

Walking is free, works for nearly everybody, and has no equipment attached, which is exactly why you never hear about it.

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.

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.

Nobody has ever been promoted for the thing they are actually best at, in my experience, and I cannot decide whether that is a flaw.

Weather forecasting got quietly, enormously better and nobody noticed because we only remember the times it was wrong.

Right, the thing nobody says about "learn to code" advice: It was decent advice in about 2012 and terrible advice by about 2020, and the people giving it never updated. It got handed to redundant workers as though the shortage was permanent and the barrier was purely knowledge. Both of those turned out to be wrong within a decade. What actually happened is that the entry level filled up while the senior end stayed short, which is the worst possible shape for someone retraining at forty. You can learn the language in a year. You cannot manufacture eight years of having seen things go wrong, and that is what the remaining jobs are actually asking for. I do not think the advice was cynical. I think it was given by people who got in early and genuinely could not see which parts of their own path were the ladder and which were the timing.

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

"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.

I started leaving my phone in another room and I feel slightly deranged about how much better it is. That cannot be right. It is a phone.

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

The replication crisis never really ended, we just stopped finding it interesting.

Why is every app now trying to be a social network? I want the thing to do the thing.