Cookie banners were meant to give people control and have instead taught an entire continent to click the nearest button without reading anything. We have trained a reflex, not a decision.

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

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.

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.

Group chats replaced forums and we lost the thing where a stranger's answer from four years ago was still there when you needed it.

You can love the work of someone appalling. I have never once met a person who manages it consistently, but in principle you can.

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

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.

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.

A genuine question for anyone who did science at school more recently than me: how much of what I was taught has quietly been revised? Nobody sends an update.

Won on the science, lost on the sequencing: almost nobody disputes the physics any more, and almost everybody disputes who pays first. Which means another decade spent explaining the greenhouse effect is a decade spent answering a question that stopped being asked.

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.

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.

Your council decides more about your actual week than Parliament does — the bins, the buses, whether the road gets fixed — and you probably can't name a single councillor.

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.

The number of people I know who have quietly cut something out of their diet and never mentioned it to a doctor is, now I think about it, most of them.

Peer review does more harm than good at this point. Two anonymous strangers, no accountability, eighteen months, and a result nobody will ever try to reproduce.

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.

Being poor is expensive and nobody tells you until you are in it. Cheap shoes twice a year, the meter that costs more per unit, the deposit you cannot save because you are paying someone else's mortgage.

Ask anyone whether they want the truth from their doctor and they say yes, then go to pieces the moment a doctor is actually blunt with them.

Museums should explain less. I have started reading the wall text before looking at the thing, which means I am now being told what to see before I have seen it.

Open-plan offices are the clearest case I know of an entire industry adopting something because it was cheaper and inventing the reason afterwards.

The best manager I ever had appeared to do almost nothing. It took me three years to work out that was the job.

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.