The Trap of Progress

For most of my life, I believed deeply in progress.

Not casually — but as a moral orientation.

Forward meant better.

Backward meant dangerous.

Stillness meant failure.

Progress promised learning, evolution, improvement. It suggested that history moved in a steady line toward greater justice, greater consciousness, greater freedom. And when it looked like we were moving backwards — socially, politically, ethically — something in me would tighten. I would feel frustrated. Sometimes angry. Sometimes genuinely afraid.

How could we lose ground we had already gained?

How could we not see what was so obvious?

I now see that what I was reacting to wasn’t just events in the world.

I was reacting to an inherited story — one so familiar it felt like reality itself.

The Spell We Don’t See

I began to understand this more clearly when I encountered Michel Foucault’s work on epistemes.

An episteme, as Foucault described it, is not a belief system we consciously adopt. It is the underlying field that shapes what can be known, said, and understood as true in a given time. It defines the boundaries of sense-making itself — quietly, invisibly.

Reading this, something subtle but profound shifted for me.

A different question emerged — not why aren’t we progressing? but how do we escape the trap of progress altogether?

Progress, I began to see, is not a neutral idea. It is one of the dominant epistemes of the modern world.

It tells us that history is linear.

That humanity is always moving forward.

That the future will be better than the past.

That anything which disrupts this arc is regression, failure, or threat.

This story is so deeply embedded that it feels like common sense. We organize our lives around it. We judge ourselves — and one another — through it.

And when reality doesn’t comply, we feel betrayed.

What the Trap Feels Like

The trap of progress has a particular texture.

It feels like urgency without wisdom.

Movement without meaning.

Change without consent.

Speed mistaken for growth.

It shows up as a relentless demand to modernize, optimize, scale, and innovate — even when our bodies, communities, and ecosystems are exhausted. It frames slowing down as irresponsibility, pausing as weakness, and questioning direction as obstruction.

Within this frame, “going back” becomes unthinkable — as though history ever moved cleanly forward, as though remembering were the same as regressing.

Progress doesn’t ask whether something works for life.

It asks whether it moves.

When I First Saw It

This began to land for me not only intellectually, but viscerally.

I found myself watching yet another cycle of outrage — another moment where it seemed obvious that we were moving backwards. Socially. Politically. Ethically. I felt the familiar tightening in my chest, the familiar thought rising almost automatically:

We’re losing ground.

But this time, something quieter interrupted.

What if we aren’t moving backwards at all?

What if what I’ve been calling “progress” is simply one inherited map — not reality itself, but a particular way of organizing meaning that feels inevitable only because I was born inside it?

What if the systems I believed should be evolving are not failing to progress at all — but are operating exactly as they were designed to operate?

This wasn’t a comforting realization.

It was disorienting.

It loosened the certainty I had been standing on.

It also stripped me of a familiar moral position — the sense that I knew where history should be going, and who or what was standing in the way.

And yet, beneath the discomfort, there was relief.

Because if the world is not failing to progress, then perhaps I do not need to carry the weight of forcing it forward.

Empire’s Favourite Story

Empire loves progress.

Progress justifies expansion.

Progress excuses extraction.

Progress reframes harm as “necessary transition.”

Progress turns dissent into obstruction.

Within this story, grief is inconvenient. Reckoning is inefficient. Memory is dismissed as nostalgia. Ancient knowledge is framed as obsolete rather than contextual.

Progress promises a better future while quietly eroding the present.

And it does all of this while sounding hopeful.

The Cost of Believing It

When we are caught in the trap of progress, something essential is lost.

We lose our ability to stay present with what is.

We lose the wisdom of cycles, seasons, and returns.

We lose patience for complexity.

We begin to confuse disagreement with backwardness.

We divide the world into those who are “evolved” and those who are “behind.”

This is not liberation.

It is hierarchy dressed as hope.

A Way Out: Remembering

The way out of the trap is not regression.

It is remembering.

Remembering that history is not linear.

Remembering that growth does not always look like expansion.

Remembering that not everything new is wise — and not everything old is wrong.

Remembering invites a different orientation:

• What is actually happening here?

• What is being preserved beneath the noise?

• What wants tending rather than advancing?

This is not about rejecting change.

It is about releasing the compulsion toward forward at all costs.

When we step outside the episteme of progress — even briefly — something softens. We become curious again. We listen. We see what the story was never designed to let us see.

I no longer ask, “Are we progressing?”

I ask: What kind of humans are we becoming in the process?

That question has no straight line.

Only a spiral.

Only a pause.

Only a remembering.

And for me, that has changed everything.