Football has too much football now.

Subtitles have quietly changed how everybody watches television and nobody has written the piece about what that does to acting.

Being late is a decision that your time is worth more than mine. There is no version of it that isn't that, however pleasantly it gets phrased.

Cricket commentary has got unbearable. Nobody describes anything any more, they just wait for a stat to read out.

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

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

I miss being unreachable and I am aware I could simply turn the phone off, and I am also aware that I will not.

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.

Every job I have had contained about four hours of real work a day and an enormous amount of theatre around it.

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.

Health advice aimed at women is still mostly either about being thinner or about having children, and it is genuinely strange how little else there is.

Every sport eventually optimises the fun out of itself, because the people playing are trying to win and nobody is trying to make it enjoyable to watch.

Most people do not actually want a shorter commute, they want the commute to be the last unclaimed part of their day, and those are different things. When I moved fifteen minutes from the office I was delighted for about a month and then quietly miserable. It turned out the forty minutes on a train had been the only time nobody could reach me. Not leisure exactly. Just uninterrupted. I read more in that year than in the three since. Everyone I have said this to responds with either violent agreement or complete bafflement, and I have not found a pattern in which. It might be about whether you have people at home who need things from you the moment you arrive. I am not romanticising it. Standing on a platform in the rain is not contemplative. But I notice that the people who successfully work from home have all invented something to replace it — a walk, the gym, a stupidly long coffee routine — and I do not think that is a coincidence.

Everything is a franchise now and the honest reason is that an unknown thing is a risk somebody has to personally sign off on.

Every popular fact you know about the brain is either wrong or from 1985. The ten percent thing, left brain right brain, learning styles, all of it, still being taught by people who mean well.

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.

Genuine question: can anyone name a single thing their MP has done? Not voted for. Done.

I have stopped believing any product review I read and I do not have a replacement, which is a genuinely new situation.

Home advantage is mostly the crowd, and the empty-stadium seasons proved it — it shrank, it did not vanish, and what was left was travel and the referee.

Shah rukh is indeed the last of the stars. Prove me wrong ✌🏻

Films are too long. Not artistically, logistically — I have children and a bus to catch.

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.

I would rather pay for a thing once than be in a relationship with it forever, and almost nothing is sold that way any more.

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.

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