Meetings are not the problem. Nobody distinguishing a meeting for deciding from a meeting for informing is the problem. Half the frustration in any organisation is people arriving in different modes and spending an hour discovering it, then booking a follow-up to do the thing they came to do.

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

Everybody under thirty-five I know treats owning a home as roughly as likely as winning something, and talks about it in the same tone.

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.

Small talk gets a terrible press, mostly from people who have never had to sit next to a stranger for two hours.

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.

Make voting compulsory. Australia manages it, turnout sits around ninety percent, and nobody there appears to be living under tyranny.

Football was better without VAR and I will not be moved on this. You cannot celebrate on a three minute delay.

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.

Being poor is expensive and nobody tells you until you are in it. Cheap shoes twice a year, the meter that costs more per unit, the deposit you cannot save because you are paying someone else's mortgage.

Walking is free, works for nearly everybody, and has no equipment attached, which is exactly why you never hear about it.

Most people who say they want honest feedback want accurate praise, and the two are easy to confuse until the feedback is actually negative. You can watch the switch happen in real time: the request is sincere, and then the first genuine criticism arrives and the next twenty minutes are spent supplying context.

AI is going to destroy more jobs than it makes. Every previous wave moved people up a ladder; this one is coming for the rungs.

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.

Nobody says out loud that getting fitter in your forties is mostly about being willing to be bad at something in public.

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.

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

Tipping has quietly become a thing you do for a screen rather than a person, and I notice I resent it far more.

Weddings have got completely out of hand and everybody involved seems to be having a worse time than they would at a decent party.

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

"Free delivery" is not free and we all know it is not free and we all still pick it, which I think says something slightly embarrassing about all of us.

I have started saying "I don't know" out loud in meetings and conversations and it has been quietly transformative, which I did not expect.

Follow the rules that make no sense anyway. The alternative is everybody deciding privately which ones are silly, and that unravels faster than you would think.

Music got worse when it got easy to make — not the songs, the filter. When a studio cost real money somebody had to believe in you before you got in the room.

Every winter the entire country gets the same cough and we have all agreed to describe it as "something going round".