Nobody knows what to do with an afternoon any more. Give most people four unplanned hours and they will tidy something.

There is no book everyone ought to have read, and the list is always suspiciously full of whatever the person making it was assigned at nineteen.

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

Sat down and added up the subscriptions. Seventy one pounds a month, and I could name four of them.

The friends I have kept are not the ones I had most in common with, they are the ones who happened to live nearby at the right time.

Podcasts are radio with the editing taken out and we have agreed to call that intimacy.

Nostalgia for early internet culture ignores that it was small, homogeneous and mostly male, and that almost everything people miss about it was a property of being small. Two hundred people can hold a norm in their heads without writing it down. Nothing about that survives contact with two million.

Long covid got dropped from the conversation very abruptly and I do not think anything about it was resolved.

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

Tipping culture has completely lost the plot and I'm saying that as someone who used to wait tables.

Does anyone else think we gave up on repairing things far too easily? Not in a nostalgic way, I mean it was a policy choice and nobody voted for it.

The useful question in a job interview is not what they ask you, it is whether anybody there seems to be enjoying themselves.

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.

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.

Everything now assumes you have a phone on you, and we made that assumption into infrastructure without ever voting on it.

The best decisions get made quickly. The ones that drag on for months usually dragged because nobody wanted to say the obvious thing out loud.

The best sporting moments are almost never the winning ones, which is inconvenient for everybody who sells sport.

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

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.

Every company I have joined has a three week onboarding plan and the actual onboarding is one person who has been there six years and answers questions. Nobody has ever written that person into the plan.

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

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.

Most "we need better communication" is really "somebody needs to make a decision and nobody wants to be the one who did".

UPI is the best thing an Indian government has built in my lifetime and it isn't close. A billion people moving money for free while most of the world still pays a card company three percent to do the same job.

A thing about going to the doctor that took me far too long to work out. For years I went in and described my symptoms in the order they had bothered me, which is the order they occurred to me, which is almost exactly the wrong order. The thing I was most worried about came last, usually in the doorway, usually prefixed with "oh, and probably nothing, but". What changed it was a GP who interrupted me about forty seconds in and asked what I was actually frightened of. I said it out loud, she dealt with it in two minutes, and the remaining eight were useful for the first time in my adult life. I now write down one sentence before I go in, which is the thing I am afraid of, and I say it first. I am aware this sounds like a productivity tip for being ill. It has changed every appointment I have had since.