If you could only fix one, fix your sleep, not your exercise. Nobody wants to hear it because you cannot post about sleeping.

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

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.

Nobody prepares you for the phone call where your parent becomes the person who needs looking after. It does not arrive as a diagnosis. It arrives as a series of small things you decide individually not to worry about — a missed bill, the same story twice, a car with a scrape nobody mentions. Each one is fine. You notice the pattern about eight months after it started. What I was not ready for is that there is no moment where anybody tells you it has changed. No appointment, no letter. You simply find yourself doing more of the phoning and more of the deciding, and one day you realise the direction reversed some time ago and nobody said. The practical stuff I could handle. What I could not was that he knew too, and was managing it, and that both of us spent about a year protecting the other from a conversation we were separately already having.

Every organisation says it wants honest feedback and has exactly one person who gives it, and that person is always halfway out the door.

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. The inquiry's recommendations are mostly more checks, and I do not know what else they could have been. But every one of them adds a person who will be able to say, honestly, that 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.

My handwriting has become genuinely illegible and I only found out because I had to fill in a form in front of somebody.

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.