May 2026
Productivity in the face of futility
On a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of this month, I spent several hours in a “am I wasting my life?” thought spiral. I was re-recording a new original song called ‘Fly Away’, whose lyric is even wackier than my usual output, and I was reminded that friends my age were getting lucrative book deals, having third-born children, getting promoted, and moving into mansions.
I realised this year, despite posting every week, my Substack following had gone from 52 to 50. The following day I had a chat about how to multiply my following on here as well as Instagram and TikTok to increase my public profile, but I decided that it wasn’t worth it. Visual media reward trivial, lowest common denominator slop, and I would take no pleasure in excelling at it.
Activities
As well as working with university students, I filled each day productively. On Duolingo, I reached a Chinese score of 115 and a Spanish score of 125, so am officially professionally proficient in both. Though in reality my grasp of Chinese is far deeper than the grade suggests and my Spanish is far weaker, because I very rarely speak it in real-life situations.
Offline, I took a beginner-level exam in Arabic and scored 40/44. I may be a nobody, but I am a literate one.
As with most months, I contributed to Hannah’s Bookshelf on Radio North Manchester, discussing six books I read last month:
And on All FM, Ruth O’Reilly kindly featured an introduction to my Greater Manchester Fringe performance, and she played two of my Chinese-language songs on the radio:
Output
Attending a wedding at the start of the month, I heard hour-after-hour of dance-floor fillers and singalong classics. It saddened me to think that I’m probably incapable of writing anything that connects with the masses in this way. But I can write pleasant background music, so I uploaded a brand new The Kev song titled ‘Background Song’. it is inspired by a brief essay from conservative philosopher Roger Scruton titled ‘The Tyranny of Pop’:
After the wedding, I heard gossip about people ‘hooking up’ after meeting each other on the dance-floor. I have never understood why that is even a thing. How can you know if you like someone if all you’ve ever seen them do is dance? Normies are weird.
On the Kevin McGeary Guitar channel, I uploaded a cover of ‘Damaged’ by Primal Scream, a love song I have liked since I was a teenager.
And I uploaded a lesson to the semi-dormant Monday Mandarin YouTube channel.
Wider World
I have now finished my fifth English-language album as a boundary-pushing bawdy balladeer who nobody has heard of. The last act was to get the cover designed. As a non-visual person, last time I saved time and money by using A.I for the cover, which meant that the whole album was rejected by Apple and possibly some other platforms.
The law degree at Salford University is the only one in the UK that has an entire module on A.I law, and as a support worker I have sat through the module twice. Most people who have taught on it lean toward optimism about A.I, making statements like “you won’t lose your job to A.I, but you might lose it to someone who uses A.I”.
A.I firm Anthropic has been accused of buying up, digitising, and then shredding thousands of print books. Philosopher Mary Harrington has described this as symbolising the end of modernity, as epochal as the invention of the printing press at the end of the Middle Ages or the Greek alphabet over two millennia ago. She also argues that we are even less equipped than our ancestors to handle the disruption.
In an interview with Channel 4, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark compared AI to the millennium bug, with which disaster was prevented due to people sensibly working around the clock in the late 1990s. He seems about as trustworthy as other tech bros.
Inspired by this scene and this scene in the sitcom ‘Hacks’, I will be holding off using A.I for the foreseeable future. Outsourcing basic tasks like composing emails may cause me to lose my rather enjoyable status as a literate nobody.