Honestly think the four-day week debate is mostly people who already have autonomy arguing about the calendar, while everyone in a warehouse gets nothing out of either version.

Nostalgia is mostly just not paying attention now. The past feels richer because it has been edited down to the good bits and you were not doing the admin.

Every generation gets told it is uniquely bad at attention, and every generation was in fact being sold something new that was uniquely good at taking it. Novels, radio, television, phones. I do not think the people were ever the variable.

Software has got worse. Everything is a web page in a costume now — slower to open, does less, and it wants an account before it will tell you the time.

Nobody actually likes standing desks. We all just got told sitting was killing us and now we're too embarrassed to sit back down.

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.

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.

Science journalism is mostly press releases with the caveats removed, and the caveats were the science.

Half the arguments I have with my partner are about the same four things and we have never once finished one. I am not sure that is a problem, which is new.

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.

Reading fiction makes you more empathetic, or at least better at imagining that other people have an interior life at all, which may be the same thing.

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.

Most people who say they "believe in science" mean they trust institutions, which is a completely different thing and much easier to break.

Years of reading about the Grenfell inquiry, on and off, and the thing that has stayed with me is not the cladding. It is that everybody involved was following a process. The manufacturers tested to a standard. The certifiers certified against the standard. The contractors specified a product that held a certificate. The building control officers checked the certificate existed. At every single link somebody did the thing their role required, and the result was a building that burned in a way everyone had been told was impossible. That is much more frightening than corruption. Corruption you can find and remove. A system where every participant discharges their duty correctly and the aggregate is catastrophic has no villain to sack, and no obvious repair. I think about it whenever anyone proposes fixing something by adding a compliance step. Sometimes another check is exactly what is needed. Sometimes it is one more person who can honestly say they did their part.

Being good at your job and being good at describing your job are almost completely unrelated skills, and only one of them gets promoted.

Being a fan of something has turned into a job. Watch the thing, read the discourse about the thing, have a position on the discourse. I miss just liking a programme.

I've come round to thinking most productivity advice is just a way of feeling organised for about a week.

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

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.

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

Every device I own wants to update itself at the exact moment I need it. I do not think this is bad luck any more.

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.

Something I keep coming back to and cannot resolve. Every institution I have any faith in — the NHS, courts, universities, the BBC at its better moments — is one I would describe as slow, expensive and frequently maddening to deal with. And every organisation I have found genuinely pleasant to interact with is one I do not trust at all. Banks with lovely apps. Airlines with brilliant booking flows. Delivery companies that know exactly where my parcel is. I do not think this is a coincidence and I am not sure it is a paradox either. Institutions that owe you something have to be procedural, because the procedure is the accountability, and procedure is slow and irritating by nature. Companies that owe you nothing can afford to be delightful, because delight is cheap when there is no obligation underneath it. Which leaves me unable to answer the obvious question: when someone says a public service should be "more like Amazon", what exactly are they asking for? Because the pleasant part and the unaccountable part might be the same part.

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.