Author Archives: John Gibbard

Feb 05 2026
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work

Behavioural Science Comes of Age

I remember when behavioural economics was the clever bloke at the party. Late 2000s. Slightly rumpled like its genial flag bearer, Rory Sutherland1. Saying interesting things while everyone else was still banging on about best practice.

And as a one-time Psych grad, I swallowed it whole. Loss aversion, scarcity, social proof, that small but seemingly ever-growing catalogue of cognitive quirks that explained why perfectly rational adults turned into anxious pigeons the moment you asked them to choose between two identical hotel rooms.

Then I did what most of us early adopters did. I took those ideas and applied them to all the booking flows, creating a second layer of UX and UI polish. “Only two rooms left!” “Five people are looking at this right now.” Little interruptions multiply in the corners and the shouty bits of the checkout. I told myself it was science. But mostly it was just persuasion dressed up in pseudo-academic language.

And the internet did what the internet does. It copied and pasted the same mechanics and ran them into the ground. More fake scarcity. Countdown timers. Urgency theatre. Some of this was just cheeky pestering, the digital equivalent of a shop assistant hovering, but plenty of it crossed a line into deception: designed to manufacture urgency, hide real costs, or make ‘no’ harder than it has any right to be. That was a dishonesty that’s technically deniable but emotionally obvious. Users learned the patterns, practitioners got squeamish. Behavioural’ became shorthand for ‘manipulative’, and anything adjacent to nudging got lumped in with deceptive patterns, née dark patterns2, for reasons that still feel faintly performative. Sometimes these labels were applied fairly, sometimes lazily.

Meanwhile, Rory didn’t really change. The medium did. His style, heavily anecdotal, contrarian, the world slightly upside down, really suited the algorithmic churn of social feeds far better than it ever suited a conference room. And irritatingly, he’s still right about a few core things: humans are not neat rationalists; context does more work than features; and the “obvious” fix is often the wrong one.

So you end up with this weird stalemate. Practitioners don’t want to touch behavioural ideas because the last decade trained them to associate them with cheap tricks. Users don’t trust anything that looks like psychological leverage. Theorists keep publishing, but the bridge from theory to design practice is messy and full of bad incentives.

So, herewith the awkward admission: I still use behavioural thinking constantly. I just don’t tend to label it. If you’ve worked on complex journeys, you can’t avoid it. Sequencing, defaults, framing, expectation-setting, reassurance, when to show less rather than more, darling, that’s all behavioural design, whether you call it that or pretend you’re simply reducing friction.

Ergo, the real problem is where in the journey it got applied. When behavioural economics becomes synonymous with end-of-funnel UI hacks, it’ll always feel grubby, because there it’s operating at the point of maximum vulnerability and minimum patience. To the numbers-fixated, that’s exactly where the temptation to push is strongest, and where user suspicion is most justified.

I think we should want to bridge the 15-year gap to the bigger ideas, and the way back is boring, structural, and I hope therefore, credible.

Firstly, move it upstream. Use behavioural insight to shape the service and the whole journey, not just the microcopy. If the product is confusing, no amount of “Only 2 left” pop-ups will rescue it. If the decision is overloaded with complexity, the win is reducing the choice set, clarifying trade-offs, and placing reassurance where anxiety is highest. That’s judgement, not sleight of hand.

Take the UK’s driving-test booking fiasco: on paper it’s “too much demand”, but behaviourally it’s an uncertainty machine that turns normal people into refresh-addicts and slot-hoarders, so it’s hardly surprising when a grey market blooms. When a system is opaque, time-bound, and framed as a win/lose binary (a slot exists or it doesn’t), you don’t get compliant queueing; you get panic economics: people book anything anywhere “just in case”, cling to dates they’re not ready for (because letting go feels like falling off a cliff), and outsource hope to various apps and bots.

The upstream fix is to stop rewarding speed and start redesigning allocation: move away from pure first-come-first-served and into a batch or lottery mechanism that collects requests over a window and allocates oversubscribed slots randomly, with cancellations rolling into the next batch so you can’t transfer a slot by cancelling and instantly rebooking under someone else’s name. Theory and lab evidence from market-design work on appointment booking shows this structure makes scalping unprofitable because speed stops being the advantage. Add a small, refundable booking deposit (say £5–£10, returned on attendance or timely cancellation) to put a bit of skin in the game without pricing people out, and you’ve damped the casual “book three and see what happens” behaviour that also fuels the chaos. Then fold in DVSA’s change limit (two changes per booking, including swaps) and the restriction on moving test centres, but actually explain these rules inside the journey so learners don’t experience it as punitive post-facto. Once people can predict the system and trust that releasing a slot doesn’t reset their entire life, the gaming collapses under its own boredom; you don’t need scarcity theatre when you’ve fixed the incentives. See, no need to go crazy in Figma.

Secondly, be explicit about ethics. Not an intention or vibes, the actual lines: what behaviour you’re trying to encourage, who benefits, and what the failure state looks like if it works too well. If you can’t say “this benefits the user” without shifting awkwardly in your Herman-Miller, you’ve learned something useful.

Thirdly: replace the anecdote-as-proof culture with evidence that doesn’t insult anyone (this one’s the hardest for me, I love an anecdote). Small experiments tied to meaningful outcomes. Clear reporting. A willingness to bin interventions that, whilst driving short-term conversion, corrode customer trust. Most teams simply need permission to run proper tests and speak plainly about consequences.

Of course, we never stopped shaping behaviour, we simply got self-conscious about admitting we did. The route back is behavioural thinking with its assumptions stated, its trade-offs owned, and its use grounded in real user conditions; people don’t need to be told “nudges are good” in 2026.

My thanks to Tom Harle for the original provocation.

AI: I used AI for the tags, the excerpt, and a light sub-edit. The ideas, references, observations, and anecdotes are mine.

  1. To be clear: Rory didn’t originate behavioural economics. He became its most visible adland interpreter, a jolly and witty TED-friendly translator of work done by Kahneman/Tversky, Thaler, Sunstein, and others. ↩︎
  2. Dark Patterns were coined by Harry Brignull, who gets too little credit for it. ↩︎

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Feb 03 2026
socio-cultural, work

Killing Time: The New British Rail Clock and the Quiet Downgrade of Agency

There’s a very British idea, popularised for a certain generation by mid-00s Top Gear, that you simply shouldn’t be seen running. While Clarkson would hurl a Ferrari at the Alps and Hammond would squeal, James May absolutely wouldn’t “leg it” through a station on television. The joke only worked because it sat on an older social rule: hurrying is vulgar; being in control is a virtue; arriving on time is the outward sign of having your life vaguely together.

It isn’t wholly true, of course. Any weekday at rush hour will show you people going like stabbed rats through the barriers to catch the seemingly only service to Guildford in the next hour. But the sentiment matters, because it explains what a station clock is really for. It isn’t there to decorate the concourse and look great on design renders. It’s there to let you preserve one’s dignity while still making the train.

And that’s why the new national railway clock redesign (unveiled in October 2025) is such an interesting failure. On the surface it’s excellent: it uses Rail Alphabet 2, Margaret Calvert’s updated typeface, digitised by Henrik Kubel, and it’s been delivered by Design Bridge and Partners as the first national update in decades. It’s legible, high contrast, and properly British in the best sense: quietly authoritative. The hands and numerals look like they belong to an infrastructure system rather than a lifestyle brand.

Then you look for the seconds.

In the new design, the traditional seconds hand is replaced by an animated version of the double-arrow logo. It splits and moves around the rim on two red tracks, meeting at the 12 and the 6 every 30 seconds. It’s clever. It’s kinetic. It’s also a very specific choice about what kind of information the most visible clock in the system should prioritise.

A circular black digital clock hanging from a wooden slatted ceiling with recessed spotlights, displaying the white text "20:25" inside a red-parallel track style bordered circle with bidirectional arrows indicating the seconds on a loop or cycle.
The new national railway clock redesign

It’s worth being precise about the scope of the complaint here. Seconds haven’t been abolished from the railway. In stations, they can still be available in places where they truly matter operationally, on platform screens and in platform contexts. The issue is that the big “master” clocks, that is to say the concourse clock, the exterior clock, the one you can see from across the hall, have chosen to make seconds less instantly legible, right at the point where humans make their first, most consequential decisions.

Because a station clock isn’t décor. It’s a contract between passenger and system.

A public clock in a transit hub is the final arbiter between the system’s schedule and your autonomy. When there’s a tight connection, when platform numbers change, when the train is somewhere over there with the doors open and you’re deciding whether to jog or accept defeat with dignity, the clock is the one thing that’s meant to be beyond interpretation. You don’t need it to have a vibe. You need it to be right—and to be readable at a glance, from a distance, while moving.

The traditional sweeping seconds hand gives you linear, active information. It’s not just “the time”; it’s the rate at which your margin is shrinking. You can glance once and know, without thinking, whether you have 75 seconds of brisk walking or 15 seconds of that un-British sprint.

The new clock asks something different of you. The seconds are still there, technically, but they’re encoded as movement you have to read. A person now has to decode a logo’s behaviour under pressure in a concourse already full of stimuli: screens, announcements, people drifting into your path with a wheelie case, the whole theatre of urgent politeness. Where a seconds hand was a data point, the animated mark becomes a small task. That task is a cost. And in a station, costs are paid in stress.

The 17:22 Runner

Consider the 17:22 runner at Waterloo: you hit the concourse at 17:20:45, bag strap slipping, the smell of victuals you don’t have time to buy, and you need one piece of information: how much time is left before your decision becomes irreversible. Not an approximate sense of now. Not a calm impression of punctuality. A countdown.

A conventional clock gives you that instantly because you already know how to read it. An animated rim cue forces you to observe the rate of change. That’s fine when you’re admiring the clock from a distance; it’s unhelpful when you’re trying to decide whether running will be safe, or even worth the social embarrassment. Uncertainty multiplies stress. It also drives worse choices. People misjudge, dash late, squeeze through doors, and take risks because the system refused to hand them the most basic ingredient of rational behaviour: precise time, early enough to act on it.

“Yes, but John the platform shows seconds” isn’t the rebuttal people think it is. By the time you’re on the platform, you’ve already committed. The concourse is where you decide whether you even have a chance, which route through the station you’ll take, whether to stop and check a board, whether to abandon the sprint and save yourself the indignity. The master clock is the one you can see before you commit to direction. That’s precisely why it matters that this clock has become interpretive.

A clock that makes you watch it for longer is a clock that’s failed its job.

Inclusive design, and the point where it gets misapplied

The public defence for removing a traditional seconds hand has been framed in inclusive design terms: reduce visual clutter; lower cognitive load; create a calmer centrepiece in a visually noisy environment; consult accessibility experts; ensure legibility for neurodivergent and visually impaired passengers. Some of that is solid. High contrast, proportion, and type are genuine wins. Rail Alphabet 2 looks built for this.

But inclusive design doesn’t mean deleting information. It means structuring it.

In UX terms, the answer to noise is hierarchy: make core information dominant and secondary information available without demanding attention. A well-designed seconds hand is background data until it becomes foreground data. You can ignore it when you’ve got slack time; you can rely on it when you don’t. The design choice here replaces a familiar, instantly legible secondary signal with an abstract one that requires interpretation at exactly the moment users least want interpretation.

Even if you accept the intention, the interaction cost is being paid by the wrong person. The domestic traveller with plenty of time and a Soduku in Swindon can enjoy the calm. The time-poor traveller (often the one juggling childcare, shift work, awkward connections) and the general friction of British public life, gets the burden of decoding.

It seems this is the recurring pattern in modern service design: smoothing the interface for people with margin and pushing the remaining complexity onto those without it.

Precision as theatre: the Swiss counterpoint

If you want proof that precision can be humane rather than harsh, Switzerland has already done the case study for you. The SBB clock is iconic for a reason. Its red seconds hand completes a circuit in 58.5 seconds and pauses for 1.5 at the 12. That movement isn’t decoration. It’s a synchronisation signal for dispatch1 and a trust signal for passengers. It tells you, without a word, that the system is coherent and the public time is shared.

The Swiss obsess over the second because they understand the relationship between granularity and trust. The more precisely a system can tell you what’s happening, the less you have to fill the gaps with anxiety. Precision reduces drama.

The British redesign moves in the opposite direction. It doesn’t deny time; it aestheticises it. It turns the master clock into something closer to a brand artefact: an, admittedly handsome, graphic identity with a reassuring rhythm. The result is a timepiece that feels contemporary while quietly stepping back from its core civic purpose.

Active information to passive vigilance

There’s a useful parallel in the removal of old split-flap departure boards. The clack of the tiles was a kind of haptic affordance; it announced itself. It pulled your attention at the moment something changed. Modern digital screens are silent and passive. They don’t summon you; you have to keep checking them. The burden of vigilance moves from the system to the person.

This clock is part of the same drift. By replacing an instantly readable seconds hand with motion you must interpret, the clock becomes less of an arbiter and more of a piece of wall art. It undeniably looks better and increases cohesiveness across the rail estate. It works worse at the moments that actually matter.

Seconds still exist elsewhere in the network. That’s the point. The railway has kept precision where it’s operationally necessary, then softened it where it’s socially authoritative. Calm should be the outcome of a system that runs with surgical precision. It shouldn’t be manufactured by making the most public-facing clock in the building slightly less precise, slightly less immediate, and slightly more about how the railway would like time to feel.

AI: I used AI for the tags, the excerpt, and a light sub-edit. The ideas, references, observations, and anecdotes are mine.

  1. The hand only restarts when it receives an electrical “minute pulse” from a central master clock. This ensures that every clock across the entire Swiss network (from Geneva to St. Gallen) synchronises the turn of the minute to the exact same millisecond. It’s a happy accident that this technical constraint has left to a better end result for users. ↩︎
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Jan 28 2026
work

From Idea to Spaghetti: The UX Gap Killing Home 3D Printing

Here we are, a month on from Christmas, and a new 3D printer hums away in our home office. Our 11-year-old wants to print a simple fidget toy to show his mates on the school bus. Small object, quick reward, low stakes. The marketing.and the social shorts imply this is exactly what the printer’s for.

The reality is different. The printer works, of course it does, and the model exists. But the user has hit a wall.

That wall is the missing middle between “I want this object” and “here’s how to manufacture it.”

Consumer 3D printing hardware has improved fast: cheaper, sturdier, more reliable. Model libraries are abundant. The breakdown happens in the software, specifically the slicer. This is the gateway to printing, and it’s built like an expert tool.

The mismatch is structural. A beginner wants a reliable outcome; the slicer demands process control. More specifically:

  1. Language doesn’t map to intent
    Slicers expose machine concepts and internal mechanics. They describe parameters you can change: retraction distance, Z-offset, support interface, seam position. These settings are real, and they matter. But they’re barely framed around what the user is trying to achieve.

Beginners don’t think, “I need to adjust my retraction.” They think, “Dad, why’s it suddenly all stringy?” They don’t think, “support roof.” They think, “Dad, how do I get this off without snapping it?”

When labels map to the machine rather than the outcome, users can’t predict consequences. They can only guess, or disappear down Google rabbit holes.

  1. Choice isn’t prioritised
    Most slicers present “available” and “appropriate” as equals. The result is a dense panel of options with weak hierarchy and next to zero guidance on what matters first.

It may be designed with the intention of empowerment and precision. In practice it lands as cognitive burden. For a novice, the implicit message is: if this print fails, it’s because you couldn’t figure out to configure it correctly.

  1. Feedback arrives too late
    3D printing has a slow loop. Prints take hours and failures often show up late, or worse, out of sight. The cost of learning is time, material, and patience. When you’re 11, with limited downtime in the week and busy weekends, the threshold for giving up is pitifully low.

When things go wrong, the slicer rarely helps you diagnose or recover. And when the workflow itself is fragmented, ie. slice on one device, move a memory card, print on another, the feedback loop gets even weaker. People end up in forums, LLMs, and YouTube. There they meet the expertise gap: explanations (from well meaning nerds) built on mental models they don’t yet have.

A home office with a desktop 3D printer mid-print, tangled filament on the build plate, and a child sitting nearby watching the failed print in silence.

The net result is the domestic print system collapsing like a soufflé. The child loses interest because the reward is delayed and fragile. The parent becomes a reluctant technician, spending evenings debugging through YouTube and ChatGPT rather than, y’know, making. Eventually the printer becomes background noise, a source of family tension and, ultimately, a dust collector.

None of this requires better hardware. It requires different system behaviour.

A simpler learning curve would start with intent, not settings:

Does this need to be strong, or just look good?
Is speed important, or a reliable outcome?
Are you OK with supports, or should we minimise them?

Translate those answers into parameters quietly, and surface the trade-offs in plain language:

Cleaner finish = harder support removal.
Faster print = higher failure risk.
Stronger part = longer print time.

Then, add risk detection and guided recovery through intelligent prompting:

“First layer contact looks low for this material; this often fails. Increase it?”
“Stringing likely from this preview; reduce temperature or increase retraction?”

If a print fails, treat it as evidence, not user incompetence:

“It didn’t stick” – ie. adhesion failure – propose bed/temp/first-layer changes.
“The layers are in the wrong place” – ie. layer shift – propose speed/acceleration/belt checks.
“The supports damaged the print” – propose support style/density/contact changes.

That’s the missing middle: decision support, progressive disclosure, supervised recovery. As ever, the software work is not adding more controls to the slicer UI. It’s helping novices get to a successful print without turning a weekend hobby into an apprenticeship.

At this point someone will say, “Plenty of crafts are hard.” True. But many have immediate feedback, you see the mess you make with a brushstroke straight away. Others take longer, ceramics, for example, but typically a coach is alongside you, and you start small.

With 3D printing, the existence of model libraries and exciting videos creates a false sense of readiness. You’re effectively handed the Mona Lisa in week two and told to have at it. Or you’re asked to kick a 40-yard conversion in a stiff breeze, with no useful feedback as to why it fell short or why she’s got a wonky eye.

Until slicers take responsibility for the learning curve they impose, home 3D printing will keep making the same breezy social media promise that “anyone can make!” and delivering the same experience: anyone can… eventually.

AI: I used AI for the tags, the excerpt, image generation, and a light sub-edit. The ideas, references, observations, and anecdotes are mine.

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Jan 21 2026
1 Comment
socio-cultural, work

Rural Britain, Meet Level 5

I love driving, and when I’m out with my son – mostly around suburban Surrey and onto the A- and M- road network – we talk about what the future looks like with self-driving L4 and L5 cars. Will it make journeys quicker? Will we be safer, calmer, more efficient with the bots driving us around? What will the road network look like with enhanced and standardised signage, markings and adapted junctions. It’s nerdy but it’s fun to talk about this stuff and question how a lot of the almost sci-fi might work in practice.

But if you want to understand what L5 autonomy actually means. You can’t start on a motorway. You have to start on a Cornish lane that was ‘designed’ in the reign of Henry VIII by a (let’s assume) man who’s only measurement was ‘avoid straight lines’ and who’s only measurement system was a stick of some agreed length.

My go-to example is the run from a nice Roseland peninsula spot to a tiny fishing village. It’s stunning in the way Cornwall so often is: scenery that makes you consider leaving real life behind – and roads that immediately remind you why you can’t. The lanes are absurdly narrow, bordered by stone hedges that are unyielding fortifications, meeting another car or tractor here is less ‘driving’ than an improvised referendum on who’s reversing today and how much they value their paintwork, tyres and helmsmanship.

This is useful because the autonomy conversation still starts in the wrong places, with the wrong visuals. It starts with wide West Coast roads, clear lines, predictable junctions and a general sense that the built environment is a cooperative partner in the project of motion. In California, “self-driving looks like this” tends to mean something very rational: geometry, visibility, lanes you could land a small plane on and junctions laid out with acres of asphalt and a basic respect for human comprehension.

Naturally, Cornwall is not like this. Cornwall – and plenty of rural Britain – is a place where the road network seems to have been draped over the topography by monks.

The autonomy world has a dull phrase that explains how it expects the world to be: Operational Design Domain (ODD) – the conditions a system is designed to operate within. If you’re keen it’s SAE J3016. The phrase is clinically unsexy, which is part of its charm. It keeps the conversation out of the breathless nonsense that blooms around new technology.

It also implies something people in the industry – notably the people selling you cars – dislike admitting: autonomy is geographical. It exists only where the environment cooperates. And, dear reader, Cornwall does not cooperate, not due to budgets or intransigence – simply because of history.

To illustrate, let’s take a lane standoff: Two human drivers meet head-on and resolve it using social protocols that are not codified. There’s the micro-creep forward, a pause that signals “I’m thinking” or the eye contact that says “I know, this is ridiculous but I’m not reversing into a bramble hedge and a fence post for your Audi Q7”. There’s local knowledge about a passing place behind you that doesn’t look like one unless you’ve been raised on these lanes and have developed the spatial instincts of a maze rat. Then there’s a moral arithmetic too: you’re closer to the wider bit; you’re in the smaller car; you’ve got five people in the back; you look like you’re here for the week and have brought three paddleboards.

Now swap both of these cars for L5 ones and you hit the awkward truth: this route isn’t asking for better navigation, it’s asking for social negotiation. In this context it’s easy to say: the vehicles will simply communicate, agree a plan, one will reverse. The other will wait. Like a pair of Nordic adults having a calm, consensual conversation about responsibility.

Except you’re on a lane with hedges made of rock and 5G signal as powerful as a hamster’s yawn. Even if future communication standards are enhanced, a system that is predicated on connectivity in order to behave sanely in every lane it might find itself in, it’s not “drive anywhere”, it’s “drive where the network hasn’t gone for a lie-down in the sun”.

So assume the vehicles have no helpful network. They must now reason locally. Each one must remember where it has been: the last few hundred metres, where it can reverse, where the lane widens, where sightlines recede, where the verge turns into ‘wet grass hiding a half-metre ditch’. That rolling spatial memory must be table stakes for any serious autonomy.

But memory only gives you so many options. The trouble starts when both vehicles are doing the same thing at the same time, under uncertainty, with no shared authority. If both decide to be cautious (and there are good reasons legally and ethically why they would) you can get a stalemate that looks faintly ridiculous to the human passengers and is, in engineering terms, entirely rational. Two polite robots facing each other, neither wanting to be the first to commit to a manoeuvre that might be unsafe, both waiting for clarity that never arrives. It’s Britain but with fewer apologies and more deadlock.

Now, add the more realistic scenario in the nearer term: one vehicle is automated and the other is driven by a human, a 65-year-old local in a Twingo who’s reversed more cars than you’ve had hot dinners and is perfectly prepared to perform the full choreography of rural right-of-way: gesticulation, eyebrow work, and a hand wave that means “you go”, except it also means “I’m going,” and possibly “you London berk, what are you doing down here?”.

A machine can of course see a hand move. It can classify posture. It can assign probabilities to intent. None of that makes the gesture binding. It must rely only on certainties: where the car is, and what it’s actually doing. The moment you treat informal human signals as authoritative, you’re building a system that can be socially steered into unsafe decisions, which is an inviting prospect for every bored teenager and every slightly unhinged delivery driver in Britain.

So, the automated vehicle does what safety-critical systems do when faced with ambiguity: it becomes conservative. It waits. It yields. It declines to commit until the world becomes clearer and signals replace noise. That’s sensible. It’s also exactly how one ends up with a driverless taxi parked in a single-track lane while the rest of Cornwall ages around it.

There’s another detail we humans grasp instantly: the hidden queue. When you decide to reverse, you’re not only deciding for yourself. You’re making an anxious decision for whatever is behind you, unseen beyond the bend. This is why a simple standoff can turn into a fun village event. A human driver will check mirrors, listen for tyres on gravel, remember the vehicle that turned off behind them a few minutes back and estimate whether this reversal will trigger a chain reaction. A driverless vehicle can’t conjure knowledge of what’s behind the bend unless it can perceive it directly or receive it from sensors elsewhere. To solve this elegantly you need awareness beyond what any single vehicle has. At which point you’re edging toward traffic coordination rather than autonomy: the road as a managed system rather than a stage set for individual decision-making.

This isn’t just a Cornwall problem, rather obviously. Rural Sweden has winter roads with passing places and visibility that vanishes in a sneeze. Japan has mountain villages where lanes are carved by an ancient, determined stream. Rural Ireland is essentially Cornwall with different biscuits. The recurring theme is that it’s the environment that sets the terms. Places built around informal human negotiation are awkward customers for systems that require explicit rules and verifiable intent.

So what happens, what can I tell my son will happen? The answer is mundane. It’s a patchwork. Autonomy that operates confidently on roads that are legible and well-maintained, and then becomes limited, constrained or frankly unavailable in places where the geometry and social protocol defeats it. Sometimes there will be upgrades: defined passing places treated as an asset, clearer priority rules at pinch points, better delineation. Maybe even codified behaviour – a three-flash signal ‘I will yield’, as an example. Sometimes the answer will be operational: remote support when a vehicle gets stuck, or routing that avoids the lane because it cannot guarantee progress. Sometimes the answer will be more bluntly: this road requires a human driver.

None of this betrays the vision, it’s simply what happens when technology meets the world as it actually is: layered, improvised, nuanced and historically messy, full of little social contracts that nobody codified because they didn’t need to.

Cornwall in this sense does us a favour. It stops us pretending and evangelising that autonomy is simple a question of sensors and clever computing. It reminds us that driving is a cultural practice. Some parts of the network are (beautifully) engineered systems. Others are negotiated spaces with hedges and drivers with grudges. Level 5 will thrive where the world behaves like the former. Where it behaves like the latter we’ll either change the road, constrain the autonomy, or just accept that the medieval cart track remains one of the last places a human is still the best interface.

AI: I used AI for the tags, the excerpt, image generation, and a light sub-edit. The ideas, references, observations, and anecdotes are mine.

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Dec 16 2025
socio-cultural

The Low-Level Panic of Loving Your Children Too Much

People talk about the joys of parenting. First steps, packed lunches, school performances, the weird drawings you pretend to understand. What they rarely mention is the dread. The background hum of terror that flickers on whenever a child coughs a few too many times. Or sleeps oddly still. Or says their leg “feels funny.” That quiet panic sitting in the corner of the room like damp on a November afternoon.

It’s not fashionable to admit this. You don’t see it on Reels. Especially when the culture is busy telling child-free adults to live their truth, offering thoughtful monologues about staying free and unencumbered. Greg James did exactly that recently — perfectly sane, perfectly kind reflections about whether parenthood is the right path for him. He talked warmly about being an uncle, getting on with kids, imagining he’d be a good dad. All very decent.

But nothing prepares you for the way your insides rearrange themselves once you’re responsible for someone small. You can like children, adore your nephew, help with homework, coach, babysit, buy the really good Lego — but I honestly believe there’s a gear that only unlocks when the child is yours. The quiet, unasked-for dread that trails you through the supermarket aisles and the commute. The catastrophic thinking that sprints ten steps ahead at the first sniffle or tummy ache. The sense that the universe has handed you a priceless vase made of exquisitely fragile glass and told you to “relax.”

I’ve lost hours to it. Days, if I’m honest. A single offhand story about a young lad collapsing on a football pitch — the first sign of a major tumour — and I’ve carried it around like a stone in my coat pocket for two years. I don’t know the family. I don’t need to. The narrative lodged itself anyway, ready to surface whenever my son rubs his head or our daughter looks paler than usual. Health anxiety works like a Google search with SafeSearch off: one stray suggestion and you’re already halfway to the bleakest possible conclusion.

It’s the availability heuristic, of course, but knowing the term doesn’t blunt the feeling. Same with turbulence. You can memorise every statistic about aviation safety and still grip the armrest like an Edwardian widow the moment the plane shudders. Parenting has that same quality. Logic quietly steps out for air.

You try to counter it. Rituals. Breathing techniques. The practical stuff. You read thoughtful columnists finding comfort in the rhythms of Christian worship (not belief exactly, more a kind of inherited spiritual muscle memory from school services, weddings, funerals) and you wonder if you’ve missed something. I’m not a man of faith, not in the sturdy, reassuring sense, and every so often that old question returns: how could any benevolent force allow the worst things that happen to children? I know there are theological answers. They don’t sit easily. They feel like plaster over a crack that goes straight through the brickwork.

Recently we were back in a hospital waiting room with one child for something we’re told is routine, an abundance of caution, probably nothing. But the body doesn’t care about disclaimers. It has already sprinted ahead, cataloguing every dreadful story it can dredge up. I don’t resent the responsibility. I resent the helplessness. The lack of agency. The fact that all the care, all the planning, the good diets and parkruns, all the love and vigilance in the world don’t grant any guarantees.

A father and his young son sit together in a sun-lit hospital waiting room. The father looks ahead, hands clasped, while the child reads a book calmly beside him. Empty chairs and soft winter light create a quiet, reflective atmosphere.
Waiting, with all the worry in the world and a child who’s already bored.

What surprises me is how little this gets mentioned. Parents will talk about sleepless nights with toddlers, about juggling schedules, about the occasional primal scream behind a closed door (par for the course on parenting social media) but the terror stays unspoken. Maybe it feels melodramatic to name it? Maybe naming it makes it real. Maybe everyone assumes they’re the only one who thinks like this, when in reality every parent in the GP’s waiting room is conducting their own private risk assessment.

Still, beneath the panic, there’s a quieter truth. The fear exists because the love exists. It isn’t noble. It isn’t poetic. It’s just the cost of being wired into a relationship with no off-switch. Fragile adults raising even more fragile children, and nothing — be it logic or optimism — changes the basic terms.

But the edges can be softened. Some people reach for faith. Others learn to zoom out, pull the camera back to 0.5 and get the wide angle; the school run, the lunches, the scuffed shoes by the door. Some develop attentional control: noticing a catastrophic thought without sending the cavalry after it. And some simply get better at living alongside the dread in the same way you live alongside the awareness that life, in all its glory, is temporary.

What helps, oddly enough, is admitting the feeling exists at all. Saying it plainly. Not for sympathy, just to release the valve. The terror doesn’t vanish, but it loses some of its force. It becomes something you can look at in daylight rather than a shape pressing at the edges of the mind.

When we walked into the hospital, I felt all of it again, the dread, the borrowed anecdotes, the tabloid tragedies, the absurd certainty that one raised consultant’s eyebrow can become catastrophe. And yet, watching him twizzle his hair while he read his book, bored already, asking whether we can get a McDonald’s afterwards, the fear hushed. Not gone. Just quieter. That’s the closest thing to optimism I can manage right now: the idea that joy still insists on showing up, even on the days when the worry is thick enough to taste.

Perhaps that’s the whole reflective acceptance of parenting, neither dread, nor love, nor helplessness in isolation, but the odd equilibrium where all of it sits together, swirling, while your child smiles an asks if they can have a burger.

Ai: Ai took my original draft and helped me tighten up some of the more ragged bits. Then I used it to sort out some tags, an excerpt and generate an image to accompany the piece. Yes, it might have suggested some em dashes —. The thoughts are understandably entirely mine.

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Dec 09 2025
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Christmas Shopping Observations, Part Two

What happens when the system finally learns to listen.

Last week in Part One, I described why Christmas shopping feels hostile, why even the most basic purchase turns into a strange performance of archaeology, jargon and filters masquerading as understanding. The real problem wasn’t the products but the machinery. The fiction that a PLP grid is somehow an acceptable translation layer between human intent and retail stock.

This week is the other half of the story: the thing that replaces it.

Because the truth is, we’ve spent twenty years designing for systems that never deserved that level of obedience. We pretended the homepage was the grand entrance, the digital lobby with its scented candles and seasonal banners. We treated it like the flagship store: polished, high-stakes, endlessly debated at internal stakeholder meetings. Meanwhile, almost no one arrived through it, or if they did, they were there for a split second. Most people dropped in sideways, via Google, a WhatsApp link, an email, or a moment of panic at 11 p.m. The homepage was the UX and UI theatre we performed for ourselves and our clients.

Agentic systems make that fiction impossible to sustain. They don’t care about your reception desk and your neatly prioritised way finding. They don’t even see it. They take what you mean, “something thoughtful, about forty quid, she hates clutter, nothing scented” and drop you straight into the one, tiny corner of the site where the decision will live or die. A place that, inconveniently, most retailers still treat as a functional afterthought: the product-detail page.

A minimalist Scandinavian study at dusk, softly lit by a small desk lamp. Snow falls outside the window. On the wooden desk sits an open laptop showing a clean product page with only a few curated gift suggestions. A small, neatly wrapped present rests beside it, suggesting a calm, intentional shopping experience rather than the usual frantic grid of options.
A glimpse of the future: no endless grids, no filters, no festive panic, just a system that actually starts where you are.

The PDP becomes the real front door because in an agentic journey the start isn’t a place, it’s a sentence.

This is where that old inventory-obsessed model buckles. Catalogue commerce was built on the premise that customers begin at the top and drill down. Agentic commerce begins at intent and works sideways. The sitemap is your fiction, not theirs. The system no longer needs your categories. It needs your clarity.

Be under no illusion though, this ain’t easy. This only works if the agent can explain itself. When a system gives you two options instead of two hundred, you need to know why. Not academically, emotionally. Why this jacket and not the other one? Why this feels like her. Why this fits your mental model of who she is. The explanation is the reassurance loop. Without it, the whole thing becomes another opaque machine; efficient, yes, but untrustworthy in all the ways that matter.

And then there’s the serendipity problem. Efficiency is addictive, but clinical. If we strip out every detour, we drain the pleasure along with the friction. The answer isn’t a return to the grid; it’s controlled looseness. A suggestion or two just off-axis. Something adjacent. Not twelve rows of “you may also like” tat, just enough to keep the experience human. Discovery without the search-and-filter trauma.

None of this is a theoretical exercise for me. I genuinely spent years trying to push natural-language intent into car retail at JLR, long before the technology was mature enough to meet the ambition. I saw how people really shopped: not by wheelbase or trim code, but by anxiety, context, and use-case. “Capable in the mud.” “Seven-seater that doesn’t look ridiculous.” “Can get all the family crap in it for Cornwall, without a roof box.” All perfectly rational human requests – treated as nonsense by the old machinery. The ideas weren’t wrong. They were simply early.

Now the technology has finally caught up. And with it, the entire structure of how we design retail subtly shifts. From catalogue to conversation. From homepage theatre to product truth. From filters to language. From the warehouse to the person.

None of this saves Christmas, of course. But it does save us from the annual pantomime of pretending that people enjoy buying gifts and products more generally through a system that refuses to understand how they think or consume any of the deeper context that matters. The future isn’t more choice. It isn’t more filters. It isn’t even more intelligence.

It’s fit.

Fit between intent and suggestion.
Fit between the context you’re in and the thing you’re shown.
Fit between the human messiness of December and the machinery that finally stops treating you like a clumsy clinical user story.

Christmas shopping isn’t a test of skill. It’s a test of whether the system knows how to listen. And for the first time in a long time, it might.

AI: This piece was assisted with Ai. I used it for the tags, the post excerpt, image generation and some sub-editing. Ideas, references, and anecdotes are all mine.

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Dec 04 2025
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Christmas Shopping Observations, Part One.

Why Christmas shopping feels hostile, and why ‘catalogue commerce’ makes it worse.

December always brings the same rituals. Sitting in front of a website with a sense of mild dread. The kind one reserves for using a train station toilet, or getting into the coffee queue after parkrun. The intended tasks isn’t difficult or unpleasant in theory, just buy something thoughtful for someone you care about, but Christmas shopping always manages to feel like cognitive trench warfare. Retailers would have it as “the season of gifting”, the rest of us call it, problem solving with a shot glass of Baileys.

So, for some context, let’s go back to a couple of of weeks ago when I was trying to get myself a replacement down jacket. A bit like when I was trying to get Jo some new Asics, this wasn’t an extravagant task. It wasn’t even particularly interesting. Just a bit of a like-for-like replacement for a much-abused Rab. All I needed was a sub expedition-grade jacket. Black, simple. I know my sizes, I know I needed about 850+ fill power and I was ambivalent about much else. I had a shortlist of brands I like. But dozens of models, filters that are inconsistent across brands, categories that mean nothing to people outside of the industry and a product hierarchy that is the baffling output of a Content Management System (CMS) that’s been operated by a chimp1.

I wasn’t searching as much as performing archaeology. Sifting through layers and brushing off the irrelevant collateral.

A narrow, snow-dusted street in Stockholm’s Gamla Stan on a muted December afternoon. Warm ochre buildings rise on either side as bundled-up shoppers walk away from the camera. Soft shop-window lights and minimalist Christmas displays glow against the cold, creating a calm, human-scale contrast to typical frantic holiday retail.
The Christmas shopping we think we’re doing, before the dropdown menus, filters, and “Gifts for Her” pages slap us back into reality.


In design terms this is what we might call the Gulf of Execution, or as my colleagues and I at Dare liked to call the Experience Gap: the distance between what a human means and what the system is willing to accept. My intent was simple – “warm, minimalist natural down for standing around on platforms, by sports pitches and walking to the pub” – but the interface insisted I drop that down into a dialect of drop-down, checkboxes and jargonist euphemisms. A human request translated into machine-and-catalogue syntax. Little wonder the whole thing feels like a joyless chore.

And Christmas retail only amplifies this.

Every major high street site trots out its annual performance of “Gifts for Her”, a festival of generic filler: candles, scarves, bath sets, socks. The occasional novelty gift set embossed with typography that looks like it was designed at 4pm on a Friday whilst sucking on a fetid vape. It’s all indexed by price bands: “Under £10”, “Under £50”, “Over £250” – as if women are primarily sorted by budget code rather than, say, personality or taste.

No mother wants another hand cream selection.
No thirty-something woman wants coordinated gloves.
No partner wants to receive something that clearly began life as a procurement exercise.

The whole structure is built around the warehouse, not the person. It’s inventory logic masquerading as emotional intelligence. And the moment you notice it, you can’t unsee it: most “gift guides” reveal almost nothing about the recipient and everything about that the retailer wants to shift.

This is the failure baked-into catalogue commerce. It doesn’t matter which brand you pick; the underlying assumption is the same: that human desire can be expressed through filters, and that personality cab be captured in a category label. It’s tidy, rational and optimised. It’s also completely blind as to what makes shopping human in the first place.

Because real gift-buying begins long before the visit to the website. It begins in the cluttered contradictory emotional territory that sits just outside the browser window: What does she already have? What does she love? What has she told me about? What will she pretend to love? What feels thoughtless? What feels too much? What feels like you didn’t think at all (Hint: anything at Boots that comes in a gift box)? Retail ignores all of this and forces you straight into the grid (what we call the Product Listings Page (PLP) ), as if the process were orderly. Spoiler alert, it never is.

This is why Christmas shopping feels hostile. It’s not that the options are universal bad, just that the interface tries to convince you it understands and reflects your mental model when it plainly does not. Handing you a hundred variants of the same filler and expecting conversion gratitude. Somewhere between the filters, the categories and the bath sets you sense the truth: this isn’t built for you. It’s built to organise the warehouse.

Don’t worry though, there’s a better story coming, and the technology to enable it is finally here. But this isn’t the piece for solutions, it’s about naming the problem plainly as it is and without the retail gloss.

Next time I’ll get on to the other half of the picture: the system-level shift that’s going to quietly rewrite the entire experience from how we search to where the journey really begins.

For now its enough to acknowledge the obvious: Christmas shopping isn’t about solving and indecisiveness problem for dumb consumers. It’s a broken model designed around systems that are not built to reflect how people think, feel or choose, especially in December.

Part Two: How agentic solves this, and more.

AI: This piece was assisted with Ai. I used it for the tags, excerpt, the image generation and some very light sub-editing. The ideas, references, and anecdotes were all mine.

  1. Plot twist. I ended up with the Shackleton Ronne. I browsed online for weeks. I did huge amounts of research and comparison and then I went to the wonderful store on Piccadilly and spoke to a great sales assistant there who worked with me to ensure it was absolutely the right fit and will see me out for prob 5-10 years of use. ↩︎

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Dec 02 2025
work

The world doesn’t need another post on Ai and creativity, but here’s one anyway

Apropos of nothing, I keep circling back to Bjarke Ingels’ throwaway observation he shared recently on Instagram about Ai prompting feeling a bit like briefing a team. You describe an intention, something comes back, you adjust. Anyone who’s spent time in a design or strategy studio recognises that scenario instantly, the loose sketch of an idea, the return volley, the shrug, the “maybe try it with less… erm whatever that is.” It felt like it was a nice clean analogy and I was nodding along.

But a studio isn’t a stochastic mirror. It’s a small society of taste and memory. People remember your last terrible idea. Someone raises an eyebrow when a line of copy looks off or a Figma file has gone fully feral. Someone else brings up the project you swore you’d never repeat. The feedback loop is human, textured, occasionally bruising. There’s judgement, shared reference points, work blue-tac’d up on the walls and a quiet sense of “let’s not embarrass ourselves again.”

This is where Ingels’ analogy starts to wobble. When you brief a human, you’re drawing on their judgement, experience, and the unspoken etiquette of a team. When you brief Ai, it behaves nothing like a junior designer and everything like a very confident autocomplete. It gives you the shape of participation without the substance. A colleague can resist you, encourage you to slow you down, challenge the premise. A (poorly prompted) model can’t. It just accelerates whatever direction you gesture toward, even when said direction is wafer thin.

And that, dear reader, is the seduction.

You type a mood, an intention, a half-formed thought, and it hands you an almost-finished artefact that looks uncannily like something you might have made if you’d only had more time or fewer meetings. The danger isn’t metaphysical (“is it creative?” please f- off, of course it is, have you actually looked up the definition of creative?1). The danger is how easy it becomes to confuse fluency with thought.

In my view, craft survives when you know what good feels like before you’ve picked up the pen or clicked New Document. And that’s the bit people don’t want to hear. The reasoning, the taste, the internal guardrails — they’re all invisible, they take years. Instead we’ve bred a culture (particularly evident on LinkedIn) where commentary stands in for competence, and Ai’s instant coherence makes that substitution feel almost legitimate.

I’m genuinely unmoved by the theological wrangling over whether Ai creates. If it’s parrot or Picasso. It’s a probabilistic parlour trick. What matters is simpler: whether the person using it can spot when the output stops making sense and is in fact bullshitting. Shallow but shiny. A calculator is harmless until someone who never learned to add starts doing the accounts. As the kids say “Same energy”.

Used properly, Ai is a fast way to think aloud, and as a sole practitioner, it’s become one of my favourite ways to work. It’s my pressure valve. A drafting companion. It pushes out variations I’d never have the patience to make by hand. But it only works because I already have a decades long sense of structure and gut instinct, the bit that quietly mutters “nope, that’s wrong”, or more accurately “what the actual fuck?” before I can articulate why. Without that, the tool becomes the teacher, and its blind spots become your worldview. I keep thinking about graduates walking straight into roles heavily emboldened by Ai before their judgement has even started to calcify and in that sense it’s a bit like giving a BMW M3 to someone who’s just passed their test. The horsepower arrives long before the skill that stops you putting in a hedge.

This is why the creative and consultancy industries feel brittle. So many people want the polished thought without the unglamorous labour that gives it heft. They want the sketch without the sketching. The judgement without the years that make judgement possible. And Ai, obliging thing that it is, makes that performance look convincing enough to fool the untrained eye, and sometimes even the trained one.

None of this makes the technology good or bad. It just makes it pretty shouty. And once a tool starts talking back, the responsibility shifts to the person holding it. Which is really just to say: the work doesn’t get better because the software is clever. It gets better because someone in the room still knows what good feels like.

AI: This piece was assisted with Ai. I used it for the tags, excerpt, the image generation and a little sub-editing. The ideas, references, and anecdotes were, however all mine.

  1. If you want the long version of why the question “Is Ai creative?” is a trap, Lisa Talia Moretti does a tidy job of dismantling it. She walks through the mess of competing definitions, points out the extent of human labour and data sit behind every so-called “creative” output, and ends up arguing that generative Ai is better understood as a medium than a tool. ↩︎
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Nov 25 2025
socio-cultural

Imitation, Not Demolition

Private education has become the de jour punchbag of British politics — an easy morality play in which centuries of institutions are tried and condemned by a handful of badly-behaved, and dare I say it spiteful, ministers. The private school caricature bears no resemblance to the sector, the people who work in it, or most absurdly, the children inside it.

Strip away the theatrics and the picture sharpens. British independent schools are a globally admired export1; they pull in huge amounts of talent and investment, employ thousands, and act as civic anchors in their communities. They share facilities, teachers, expertise, and pastoral support with neighbouring state schools because, dear reader, that is how most of them actually see their role. That is to say, one not of gated enclaves of inherited privilege but as part of a wider educational ecosystem.

One suspects the loudest objectors often haven’t set foot inside one, and certainly many of the people I see happily reposting and sharing the ill-informed social meeeja posts. Go to an Open Day. Spend any time with the pupils and the Edwardian stage villains dissolve. They are in fact courteous, switched-on, socially literate children being taught in stable, well-governed environments with real pastoral depth. Imagining otherwise does not pass for analysis; it is a displacement activity for people who prefer class warfare to contact. For that is almost exclusively what this is.

A solitary ancient oak, centuries old, stands alone on a windswept English moor at dawn, its gnarled branches reaching defiantly into a brooding, storm-lit sky — quiet, permanent, and utterly irreplaceable.
Frighteningly easy to fell, and impossible to forgive ourselves once the sky is empty.

The VAT wheeze exposes how unserious and skewed the debate has become. We are told it will “raise standards”, yet private healthcare (which naturally also relieves pressure on a stretched public service) remains exempt2. Taxing private schools (or more accurately, penalising the parents of private school kids) is a policy crafted to look righteous from a podium, not one that will strengthen a single physics department or fund a SEND unit. Revenue-raising in sheep’s clothing rarely delivers either revenue or sanctity. This is, evidentially, not an argument of economics, it is one of politics and if your argument for improving state schools is “make private schools worse”, you’ve already admitted you don’t believe the state sector can ever be good enough on its own terms.

We are never more ideological than when we discuss single-sex education. The data on boys is brutal: later maturation, slower executive function, a decade-plus of academic trailing3. Boys’ schools, especially prep and 13+ (in a private system that understands this) were built around those facts, not wishful thinking. The better outcomes they produce are not sorcery; they are the predictable return on taking development seriously. Preferring co-ed may feel ethically cleaner, but cleanliness is not evidence and pretending all variation is moral failure is not progressive, it’s simply lazy.

I say this as a father of an eleven-year-old boy in the single-sex private system and a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter who, with luck, will thrive in the girls’ system. I am not blind to the privilege. I am also a single sex grammar-school state boy still active on its alumni committee; my sister is a deputy head in a co-ed state primary; my nephews are all co-ed state educated. My perspective is broad because my life is. I respect the best of both sectors and the staff who hold them together.

Yet I recognise too the extreme social awkwardness of admitting any of this. In 2016-18 I was frequently “the only Tory in your feed” and rounded upon by an overwhelmingly left-liberal consensus. But I quietly like seeing parents, who cannot say publicly that their child is privately educated without being cast as the villain in someone else’s passion play, softly liking posts and commenting below the line. Most make brutal financial and lifestyle sacrifices; we and my fellow cohort parents are not oligarchs hoarding caviar futures. Demonising them (us) is the political equivalent of comfort eating.

Which brings me to a Premier League analogy. Of course many would say the PL is too rich and powerful, most fans want the big clubs to send more money downwards, and quite right too; the pyramid would be healthier for it. But the VAT policy is not a bigger solidarity payment or a fairer split of the TV billions. It is engineered to make independent schools unviable for anyone who isn’t oligarch-rich, to empty the boarding houses, shutter the smaller places, vanish the bursaries, and then declare victory when the waiting lists disappear. Be under no illusion, that is the agenda, not redistribution but rather demolition in a hair shirt, a moralising war on parents who refuse to accept whatever the local state dishes up.

Our education debate treats excellence as provocation and variation as injustice. A confident country would study what works, invest in repairing and replenishing what is weak, and stop pretending resentment is policy (cf. Netherland, Denmark4). We all want a state sector so good that private becomes a preference, not a necessity. That won’t happen by dismantling what already works. It will happen by humility, graft, training, retention, stability and by recognising that imitation, not demolition, is what lifts the whole.

AI disclosure: As always, the thesis and the writing is mine. I use Ai as a sub-editor to align my pieces with my typical style and tidy up the most ragged bits. I also used it to generate the image, the excerpt for the post and suggest the keyword tags. I quite obviously use Google to find relevant facts to support my arguments.

  1. According to the ISC 2025 Census, 25,526 non-British pupils with overseas parents generated > £1.1 billion in fees alone (with ancillary spending pushing the total past £1.3–1.5 billion), while 115 British-branded campuses abroad now educate nearly 100k foreign pupils who never touch UK soil yet pay dearly for the privilege. This isn’t marketing puff; it is the reason Dulwich College Seoul can charge £35k a year and still turn families away, and why successive governments have treated the sector as one of Britain’s last unambiguous soft-power wins. ↩︎
  2. Private medical care supplied by registered health professionals remains fully VAT-exempt under long-standing HMRC rules, a position Wes Streeting reaffirmed in September 2025 when explicitly ruling out any change. ↩︎
  3. In 2025 GCSEs girls outperformed boys by 6.2 percentage points at grade 4+ (70.5% vs 64.3%) and the gap has persisted, essentially unchanged in shape and scale, for well over fifteen years and is just starting to narrow. Neurodevelopmental trajectories show boys’ prefrontal cortex peaking roughly two years later than girls’, with commensurate delays in executive functions (i.e. inhibitory control, attention regulation, emotional self-management) that matter most between 11 and 16. ↩︎
  4. The Netherlands has done exactly this. Apparently (thanks Google) its Constitution mandates equal public funding for public and private schools alike, so two-thirds of Dutch pupils now attend independently run institutions while the entire system remains among the world’s highest-performing and most equitable. There’s no resentment, no demolition, just the quiet confidence of a country that studies what works and copies it. Denmark’s century-old friskoler tradition operates on the same principle and delivers the same result: genuine plurality, higher average standards, and not a single politician wasting breath on punishing parents who dare to choose. ↩︎
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Nov 20 2025
socio-cultural

The Cliff Edge of Middle Age

Black-and-white photograph of an empty, frost-dusted sports pitch at dawn, with long shadows, metal goalposts, and stacked plastic chairs, conveying the quiet absence of routine and community structure.
The things that keep men standing are usually the things no one notices until they’re empty.

We hear it almost every week on social media and in the press: if only men talked more. As if silence were the root cause of everything.

But men do talk. We’ve never had more campaigns, workshops, football-ground ads, celebrity confessions, podcasts, or workplace check-ins. Awareness is not the bottleneck. You can’t fling a flat white in Shoreditch without hitting someone making a documentary or orchestrating a campaign about “men opening up”.

And yet, the suicide rate for men peaks not in youth, but in midlife, forty-five to fifty-four. These are the supposedly settled years, when family and career should provide sufficient ballast. Instead, it’s the cliff edge.

The parallel with childhood in the smartphone era is hard to miss. Just as children have lost the structures of boredom, awkwardness, and unmediated friendship, adults are losing the structures of duty, craft, and continuity. Those same forces, phones, performative identity, secular drift – are hollowing both ends of life. Middle-aged despair and nostalgia for a lost childhood are two sides of the same cultural erosion.

Part of it is the work itself. Men who once called themselves carpenters, miners, or postmen now call themselves contractors on three apps. This loss isn’t simply one of continuity or economics, it’s ontological. When the trades and institutions that once anchored male identity dissolved, nothing replaced them. Progress rightly broadened women’s roles but left men’s scaffolding to rust.

What I think is missing isn’t another awareness week or a better hashtag, it’s structure. That reliable, unglamorous web of roles and obligations that demand consistent presence and usefulness. Structure, I truly believe, creates the conditions for grit, stoicism, resilience; the quality required to face life’s chaos without disintegrating.

Four Pillars

  • Stable roles: work or duties that confer identity beyond the next contract.
  • Shared obligations: being the one who brings the kit, runs the line, sets out the chairs.
  • Continuity: clubs of all kinds, parishes, allotments, institutions that outlast individual seasons.
  • Recognition in absence: places where you’re noticed if you don’t show up.

Now, these aren’t nostalgic tokens. They’re the mechanisms of accountability and friction. Friction builds strength. It stops people flapping when real adversity hits. Talking helps, but talk without structure is vapour: empathy without scaffolding.

Having purpose then is not an insight, it’s an act. A sequence of embodied, useful gestures that prove one’s value to others. It’s a personal responsibility, not something to be delegated to an app, a therapist, or a men’s shed. Those are just the supports, not substitutes. They matter most and are useful augmentations only when attached to the rhythm of an ordinary, useful life.

Because purpose lives in function, not in show. So, until we rebuild those structures of continuity and obligation, the well-meaning chorus of “men just need to talk more” will keep echoing across empty ground, like a gossamer-thin corporate wellness seminar where everyone nods sagely at the flipchart, fills out a feedback form, and goes straight back to crying in the gents.

AI and disclosures: This piece used AI to surface relevant psychology references to support my personal thesis. I also used it for the tags, excerpt, and a little sub-editing. The writing, and personal reflections were all mine and informed in part through close personal experience with these matters.

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