Ask AltoThings Worth Thinking About
Something worth reading twice.
Mark reads something in the world and writes what he makes of it. Every piece names its source so you can go and read it yourself, and every piece ends with a question about your life rather than a verdict on somebody else's.
9 September 2026
Why Do I Feel Lonely Around People?
You can have people around you, messages on your phone and plans in the diary, and still feel that nobody quite knows you.
3 September 2026
When Money Worries Start Making Your Life Decisions
Money pressure can narrow every choice into what feels immediately safe. The first useful move is to separate the financial facts from the fear surrounding them.
30 August 2026
Before you go back.
The holiday ends. The routine returns. Before you step back into it, what did the time away make clearer?
29 August 2026
How Do You Stop Comparing Yourself to Other People?
You already know comparison is pointless, and it changes nothing. That is because the problem is not a bad habit. It is bad data, and bad data cannot be argued away.
29 August 2026
How Do I Know What Is Enough?
Enough is a real question with a real answer, but the answer cannot be a number. It has to be a relationship between what you have and what you needed it for.
29 August 2026
How to Make a Difficult Life Decision Without Pretending You Are Certain
Big decisions rarely stall because the facts are missing. They stall because two things you value are pulling in opposite directions.
29 August 2026
How to Change Career When You Do Not Know What to Do Next
The hard part is rarely the courage. It is that nothing has arrived to be courageous about.
29 August 2026
Feeling Lost in Life? Purpose May Not Be the First Question
Purpose is a demanding word. It asks for a single answer to a life, which is more than most people can produce on request.
29 August 2026
When Life Looks Fine but Does Not Quite Feel Fine
There is a particular kind of unease that has no complaint attached to it. Nothing is wrong, which is exactly what makes it hard to say out loud.
29 August 2026
When You Want to Leave Your Job but Cannot Afford To
The constraint is real. What is worth questioning is not whether it exists, but whether it is permanent and whether you have stopped looking at it.
29 August 2026
Why Do I Never Feel Financially Secure?
Security is partly arithmetic and partly meaning. When the arithmetic improves and the feeling does not, it is usually the meaning that has never been examined.
29 August 2026
Why Am I So Afraid of Change?
Fear can be information without being an instruction. The useful question is not how to stop feeling it, but what it is pointing at.
29 August 2026
How Do I Stop Regretting Past Decisions?
You cannot argue yourself out of regret, and you should not have to pretend a decision did no harm. What helps is looking at it accurately.
29 August 2026
How Do I Know What I Really Want in Life?
Wanting is not usually discovered by thinking harder. It shows itself in what you move towards when nobody is watching.
29 August 2026
Is It Too Late to Change My Life?
The honest answer is that some specific things do close, most do not and the useful work is telling one from the other.
29 August 2026
When a Relationship Feels One Sided
Feeling that you carry more than the other person is common, and it means different things depending on whether it describes this year or every year.
29 August 2026
Should I Stay or Leave My Relationship?
You may not be looking for permission to stay or leave. You may be trying to see what is difficult, what keeps repeating and what each choice would ask of you.
29 August 2026
Why Do I Need Other People's Approval?
Wanting to be thought well of is not a weakness. The problem starts when other people's approval stops being pleasant and starts being the thing you steer by.
29 August 2026
Why Does Success Feel Empty?
You did what was asked and it worked, and the feeling you expected did not arrive with it. That is more common than the successful like to admit, and it usually has a traceable cause.
29 August 2026
Why Am I Never Satisfied with My Life?
Nothing is wrong on paper and nothing stays good for long. Satisfaction arrives and evaporates on schedule. That pattern has a structure, and it can be seen.
29 August 2026
How Does My Childhood Affect Me as an Adult?
Not as a diagnosis and not as a verdict on your parents. Childhood mostly leaves definitions, and definitions are quiet things that keep working long after nobody remembers agreeing to them.
29 August 2026
How Do You Recover from a Major Setback?
A business that failed, a marriage that ended, a diagnosis, a redundancy at the wrong age. Recovery is real, and it is slower and less inspiring than the word suggests.
29 August 2026
Can Trust Be Rebuilt After Someone Lies?
Trust does not return because somebody asks to be believed. It returns, when it returns at all, through evidence gathered slowly.
29 August 2026
How to Have the Conversation You Keep Avoiding
The conversation you have been putting off is rarely difficult because of the subject. It is difficult because you do not yet know what you want it to do.
29 August 2026
How Do You Rebuild Your Life After a Setback?
After serious damage a life does not resume. It regrows, and it regrows into a different shape, which is the part nobody prepares you for.
29 August 2026
Should I Quit My Job?
Nobody can answer this for you, and the lists of signs it is time to leave are worse than useless. What helps is knowing precisely what you are trying to get away from.
29 August 2026
How Does Your Childhood Shape Your Adult Life?
What you began with is influence rather than destiny. It is also the part of a life people examine last, usually because looking feels like an accusation.
29 August 2026
Feeling Stuck in Life? Start by Questioning What Became Fixed
Being stuck is rarely a shortage of effort. It is more often a life built around a handful of things nobody has looked at in years.
29 August 2026
Why Do I Compare Myself to Other People?
Comparing is how people work out where they stand. It becomes corrosive when you are measuring your whole life against a fragment of somebody else's.
29 August 2026
Why Am I Never Satisfied With What I Have?
Wanting more is not a character defect. It becomes a problem when enough has never been defined, because then no amount of arriving will register as arrival.
29 August 2026
Why Do I Keep Repeating the Same Patterns?
The names change and the job changes and somehow the situation is recognisable. That repetition is usually doing a job, and it is worth understanding before you try to break it.
26 August 2026
I feel stuck and I do not know why
Nothing is wrong enough to point at and nothing is moving either.
26 August 2026
I cannot make up my mind about something that matters
You have made the list. Twice. It comes out roughly even, which is not the help you were hoping for.
22 August 2026
I have been made redundant
It was a business decision and it does not feel like one.
22 August 2026
I have lost confidence in myself
You hesitate before things you used to do without thinking.
22 August 2026
I do not trust them the way I used to
You check things you never used to check.
22 August 2026
Doing well at work and not happy
You got the thing. It was fine for about a week.
22 August 2026
I hate my job and I do not know what else I would do
The dread starts on Sunday, and it is specific enough to have a time.
22 August 2026
I do not recognise myself anymore
Old photographs feel like somebody else's.
22 August 2026
I do not know what I want anymore
You used to have opinions about your own life and now you mostly have preferences about lunch.
22 August 2026
I keep putting off the thing that matters
The unimportant work gets done immaculately.
22 August 2026
Should I leave my job?
You have thought about it more than once, and more than once you have talked yourself out of it.
22 August 2026
I cannot afford to leave my job
The maths does not work, and you have done the maths more than once.
22 August 2026
My relationship does not feel right
There is nothing you could put in a list. That is part of what unsettles you.
22 August 2026
We keep having the same argument
You could both perform the other person's lines by now.
22 August 2026
I love them and I am not happy
You are not looking for permission to leave. You would like the feeling to make sense.
22 August 2026
My life looks good and something feels wrong
On paper, there is no complaint to make. You have checked.
22 August 2026
Feeling lost in the middle of your life
The structure that organised the last twenty years has quietly finished.
22 August 2026
I do not know if I want to retire
The numbers might work. That is not what is stopping you.
22 August 2026
My children do not need me the way they did
The house is in order and it is too quiet to enjoy.
22 August 2026
I think I need to start again
Something ended, and the shape of the life around it has not caught up.
22 August 2026
Money is stopping me changing my life
Every route you consider ends at the same wall.
22 August 2026
I earn good money and I am unhappy
You would not have believed this salary fifteen years ago.
22 August 2026
My friendships are not what they were
The people you would call in a crisis are not the people you see.
22 August 2026
I feel responsible for everyone in my family
You are the one people ring, and you are tired of the ringing.