At this fundamentally exhausting moment in human history, we find ourselves slap bang in the middle of a progress arms race, where everything – literally everything – is posed as perfectable.

That’s not just thanks to the AI industry, though its acolytes shout the loudest when they tell us that their plagiarism robots can help us blast through life more efficiently. Somehow, the myth of endlessly optimisable production has infiltrated every part of our lives.

Now, you can listen to your podcasts on double speed for ultimate uptake, max out your sleep for ultimate restoration, biohack your mind for ultimate clarity, and relax more intensely than your peers.

In such a landscape, where nothing is ever good enough or fine as it is, the past only appears more distant. We used to marvel at how people lived their lives a hundred years ago; now we’re being told even life before AI should be viewed as a kind of rudimentary stone age, filled with cavemen who submitted to the barbaric indignity of writing their own emails.

My love of classical composition has been with me always but in the last year or so, this love has become an obsession

Call me a luddite but this endless........

© The Guardian