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

Telling people to "just move somewhere cheaper" ignores that cheap places are cheap because the work isn't there, which is the entire thing you needed the money for.

The hardest thing to find now is something made by one person who was not thinking about an audience.

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

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

Self-driving is a much harder problem than anyone selling it admits. The driving was never the bit — it is the one situation in ten thousand that nobody wrote a rule for.

Make voting compulsory. Australia manages it, turnout sits around ninety percent, and nobody there appears to be living under tyranny.

Ask a city what it wants and it says better public transport. Ask about the bus and the room goes quiet. The bus is the only bit that is affordable, deliverable this decade and actually useful to people without money — and it is the one thing no city gets excited about announcing.

Every handover document is written by somebody who has already mentally left, which is why none of them are any good.

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.

Remote work has made engineering teams worse, and the bit that broke is the part nobody wrote down: juniors learning by overhearing.

Every restaurant is too loud now and I refuse to accept it is just me getting old.

Most advice on how to argue better assumes both people want to find out what is true, and in most real arguments at least one person is defending a position they have already told other people they hold.

Running is boring and that is the entire point. Every attempt to make exercise entertaining has produced something people stop doing in March.

Sport is the last mainstream thing where the outcome is genuinely unknown to everyone watching, and that scarcity explains most of what it costs. Everything else in the culture now arrives pre-summarised, already reacted to, and with the ending available before you start. The live unknown is what the broadcast money is really buying.

Football fans do not want their club to be successful, they want it to be theirs. That is why every ownership row goes the way it does.

Buying a house is the only serious purchase where you bid against a number nobody will show you, and everyone has agreed to find this normal.

"Just be more confident" ignores that confidence is downstream of having been right in front of people a few times, and nobody can give you that. You can only be handed the room, and whoever is giving the advice is usually the one who decides who gets the room.

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.

Nobody has ever said "we should document this properly" and then documented it properly.

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.

We should be spending vastly more on stopping the next pandemic, and we will not, because prevention has no photograph attached to it.

Genuine question: can anyone name a single thing their MP has done? Not voted for. Done.

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

Most people do not actually want a shorter commute, they want the commute to be the last unclaimed part of their day, and those are different things. When I moved fifteen minutes from the office I was delighted for about a month and then quietly miserable. It turned out the forty minutes on a train had been the only time nobody could reach me. Not leisure exactly. Just uninterrupted. I read more in that year than in the three since. Everyone I have said this to responds with either violent agreement or complete bafflement, and I have not found a pattern in which. It might be about whether you have people at home who need things from you the moment you arrive. I am not romanticising it. Standing on a platform in the rain is not contemplative. But I notice that the people who successfully work from home have all invented something to replace it — a walk, the gym, a stupidly long coffee routine — and I do not think that is a coincidence.