The Myth of Progress

I am a big fan of modern medicine. I like my car, I need electricity, I even (mostly) enjoy the internet. I could do without my television … but watching good movie (on DVD) makes it worth owning.

I mourn the fields and sighing pines that are now condos, and the state of my attention before the omnipresent pocket screen. I miss the world pre-9/11, life in the middle before extreme political division. I miss local bookstores and reading culture, when everyone seemed to be holding a mass-market paperback.

I am not a purveyor of nostalgia, though nostalgia is genuine human emotion and has evolved with us for a reason. I do realize that we’ve come a long way baby, and even the decades of my youth—the 70s and 80s—had pockets of shittiness we’re better off without.

But I’m also not a blinkered techno-utopian. 

I miss Google search before it became “enshittified” and definitely life before generative AI. Slop and outsourced thinking is a problem; not having a reliable way to know if something is true is worse.

Progress is just change, and change is sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Great things are gained with breakthroughs, something is inevitably lost along the way. There is no unseen digital hand, no Prometheus of circuitry and silicon, steering us ever forward to “better.” This belief is a myth.

The myth of progress does not only apply to technology. It applies to social progress, and the progress of a life.

As we grow older we gain wealth, wisdom, strength, autonomy, influence.

We lose innocence, wonder, malleability, potential. And if I’m getting dark, we lose everything at the end. Maybe we progress to some paradise of the afterlife, but there is no assurance there.

Unfortunately there is no magical formula for getting this balance right.

What can we do?

Slow the fuck down. Encourage and celebrate measured, incremental progress. Be thoughtful, as humans can be, and strive to make more of these changes the positive sort.

Be kinder, stop killing each other for a few minutes.

Celebrate our past, preserve and honor what is great about it.

Understand the tradeoffs that inevitably come with technology and efficiency and the sprawl of development.

Talk like adults about all this, rather than behave like children striving to win a game that never was one to begin with.

I realize I sound a bit like an old man shouting at clouds, without hope. 

But I am hopeful we can figure this out, and discover the peace that comes with balance.

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Or at least bring back Pizza Hut of the 1980s.