Moving house is the only reliable way to find out what you actually own, and the answer is always "far less than this".

Subtitles on, always. I don't care that it supposedly means my hearing is going — I catch about a third more of what is actually said.

Can we talk about the specific misery of a group chat trying to decide where to eat? Six people, all of whom have a preference, none of whom will state it first. Somebody offers a place. Two react with a thumbs up, which means nothing. One says "I'm easy!" which is a lie. The person who actually wanted Thai says nothing, because saying it now would look like overruling. Ninety minutes pass. You end up at the place nobody chose, which everyone privately rates about a six. The thing is that this is not a coordination problem, it is a status problem. Everyone knows the fastest solution is one person deciding. What nobody wants is to be the person who decided, because then the evening is theirs, and if the food is mediocre it is their fault. The only fix I have found is somebody booking it before the chat starts. Not suggesting — booking. Nobody has ever objected, which rather gives the game away: it was never that people disagreed, it was that nobody wanted to own it.

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.

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.

I have never regretted spending money on a good mattress or decent shoes. Almost everything else I have regretted.

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

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

The honest reason I have not switched energy supplier, bank or insurer is that it is dull, and the entire industry is built on exactly that.

Everybody is tired and nobody can say precisely of what, and I think that is the actual condition rather than a symptom of one.

Sport is the only place left where we are collectively fine with someone being obviously, measurably better than everyone else, and I find it interesting that we cannot tolerate that anywhere else.

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.

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.

A thing about friendship after about thirty that I do not think anybody warns you about. It stops happening by default. School, university and your first job all put you in a room with the same people repeatedly for years, and every friendship you have was quietly manufactured by that. Then it stops, and the machinery goes with it, and nobody tells you because the people it has already happened to have stopped noticing. What replaces it is admin. You have to want it enough to put a date in a calendar six weeks out, and then to still want it on the night, which after a full week is a genuinely different question. The friendships that survive are not the deepest ones. They are the ones where somebody was willing to do the admin. I find that slightly bleak and also I have made my peace with it. The alternative was assuming it was about me, and it took about four years to work out that it was structural. Everyone I have said this to since has said some version of yes, and then said they thought it was just them.

Calling it phone addiction misses it. Most people are bored at work, and the phone is the only thing that isn't.

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.

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.

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

I started leaving my phone in another room and I feel slightly deranged about how much better it is. That cannot be right. It is a phone.

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

Most advice on how to argue better assumes both people want to find out what is true, and in most real arguments at least one person is defending a position they have already told other people they hold.

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

Weather forecasting got quietly, enormously better and nobody noticed because we only remember the times it was wrong.

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.

Remote work has made engineering teams worse, and the bit that broke is the part nobody wrote down: juniors learning by overhearing.