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.

unpopular opinion but most "food deserts" are actually time deserts. the shop is there, people are working two jobs.

The algorithm has quietly killed the thing where you find something you were not looking for. Every recommendation is a slightly worse version of what I already like.

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

Being the person in the group who organises things is a thankless job and it is always the same person, and that person is usually tired.

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.

Being late is a decision that your time is worth more than mine. There is no version of it that isn't that, however pleasantly it gets phrased.

Term limits, everywhere, no exceptions. Nobody should be able to build a forty-year career out of a job that was meant to be temporary.

A backdoor for one government is a backdoor for everyone, and this is arithmetic rather than politics. A key that exists can be stolen.

Every few years somebody announces that we have cured a thing in mice, and nobody ever writes the follow-up where it did not work in people.

"Trauma" now stretches from genocide to a bad line manager, and somewhere in that stretch the word stopped doing any work at all.

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.

Saying the uncomfortable thing is usually the kind option, and almost nobody does it, because the discomfort arrives immediately and the kindness turns up months later.

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.

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

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

Every interface is now designed to be learned once and never thought about, which is wonderful until the day it does something you did not ask for.

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

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.

Running a car costs most people about four hundred a month once you count everything, and almost nobody has ever counted everything.

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

We will still be typing passwords in ten years. We have been promised their death for two decades and I am still resetting one most weeks.

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.

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.