Startups are a worse deal for employees than they were ten years ago. Same hours, same risk, a much thinner slice, and the exit that justified it happens far less often.

Renting is not throwing money away, and I say that as somebody who spent eight years feeling ashamed about it. You are buying the ability to leave.

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

What I actually miss is software that was finished. You bought it, it did the thing, and nobody moved the buttons on a Thursday.

Follow the rules that make no sense anyway. The alternative is everybody deciding privately which ones are silly, and that unravels faster than you would think.

The best thing about a newspaper was that it ended. You got to the back page and you were done and nobody suggested anything else.

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

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.

Half of what gets called "doing your own research" is reading until you find somebody who already agrees with you and then stopping.

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

If you could only fix one, fix your sleep, not your exercise. Nobody wants to hear it because you cannot post about sleeping.

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

Money has ruined more sport than it has rescued. Every competitive balance measure in every major league has got worse since it arrived, and that is the table, not nostalgia.

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 political arguments look like disagreements about facts and are really disagreements about what matters. The first kind can be settled. Nobody in history has settled the second by producing a better statistic.

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

AI is going to destroy more jobs than it makes. Every previous wave moved people up a ladder; this one is coming for the rungs.

We are going to spend the next ten years discovering which parts of the internet were being held together by people doing it for free.

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.

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.