We treat mental health at work like it is about resilience training when it is mostly about workload and whether your manager is a decent person.

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.

Renting is not throwing money away, and I say that as somebody who spent eight years feeling ashamed about it. You are buying the ability to leave.

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.

I have started saying no to things eleven months in advance and it turns out absolutely nothing happens.

Living in a city is greener than living in the countryside, which reliably annoys everyone who moved out for the fresh air.

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.

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

Every handover document is written by somebody who has already mentally left, which is why none of them are any good.

Nobody budgets for the thing that actually ruins a month, because the thing that ruins a month is never in the categories.

Telling people to "just move somewhere cheaper" ignores that cheap places are cheap because the work isn't there, which is the entire thing you needed the money for.

Everybody says they want politicians to admit mistakes and everybody punishes the ones who do, and I include myself in that.

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

Sequels have not got worse. We got older, and no film is ever going to land on you the way one did when you were fourteen.

Nobody plays anything until it goes dark any more and I cannot work out whether that is the traffic, the phones, or the parents.

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.

We know more about the surface of Mars than the floor of our own ocean and that is a genuinely strange set of priorities.

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

Youth sport got professionalised and the result is ten year olds with strength programmes and nobody left to make up the numbers on a Sunday.

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.

Nobody I know under forty mentions a pension and nobody over fifty talks about anything else. There is no middle period where it gradually comes up. One day it is simply the topic.

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.

A backdoor for one government is a backdoor for everyone, and this is arithmetic rather than politics. A key that exists can be stolen.

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

Every messaging app eventually turns into a bad email client. Threads, then search, then folders, then somebody adds a rules engine and we are right back where we started.