#11: believing in progress
do you embrace progress or resist it?
I joined a philosophy club recently. 30 of us meet at a little bar and split into groups of six. You walk in, sit down, share your name, and jump into it. Everyone leaves their ego at the door, creating a space of pure, unfiltered thought and debate.
Last time, we talked about beliefs.
How much free will do we have in choosing our beliefs?
Do you truly believe something if it doesn’t change your behavior?
How much power do we really have over what we think is true?
If someone offers you a billion dollars to make yourself believe you’re a walrus for a week, is that even possible?
Over the course of the conversation, it became clear that many different types of beliefs exist. There are the deep rooted ones you've had since childhood, which you arguably have little control over. Then, there are the beliefs you consciously adopt as you grow older and begin to define yourself. Finally, there are perhaps the strongest ones - those that seemingly come out of nowhere during a traumatic instant.
The common thread that started to reveal itself is real beliefs drive behavior, consciously or not. Otherwise it’s likely just an “opinion,” a type of recurring thought that’s susceptible to change and doesn’t drive much behavior outside of happy hour.
Naturally this conversation got me thinking about my own beliefs, and I realized there’s one belief in particular I’ve kept revisiting and tinkering with over the years. It’s a belief that has significant influence on my behavior, and one that I think will keep dividing society more and more unfortunately.
Progress
The rate of human progress has never moved at this speed. Not even close. Consider how ~40% of all technological innovation has happened in the last 30 years. How absurd is that?
And if you simply don’t believe that, let’s be generous and lengthen that timeline. Let’s look at the last 500 years, which is 0.1% of all human existence. The Enlightenment, the United States, the Industrial Revolution, batteries, engines, cameras, the internet, AI...it took 5,000 years to go from wheel to car, 80 years to go from car to the moon, 30 years to go from internet to AI.
Everything we know today was practically invented over the span of 6 generations. Humans have been around for 10,000+ generations!! It’s hard not to think the fate of humanity is now in our hands, which brings me to the key question here..
Is progress good or bad?
In the long run, does it even matter?
Should we be embracing progress or resisting it?
And let me preface this by saying I’m coming at this from the perspective of someone who is generally pretty well off in the world. I don’t need to worry about my health or my safety on a daily basis and I’m fortunate enough to be able to spend my free time doing things like this. If you look at progress from the perspective of world health and prosperity, it’s undeniable that progress improves the overall well being of humanity. Anyone against innovation is fortunate enough to have an opinion in the first place. Anyways..
There’s clearly a growing divide right now between supporters and critics of progress, especially around AI. A year ago, if you asked people about their AI usage, they'd simply say yes or no. Now there’s a growing, active resistance.
I’m 100% pro-progress. That’s what drives my actions and acts as the seed for many things I’m passionate about. I love AI. I love avatars. I love computers. I love books (an innovation at one point in time). I think human life tangibly improves tenfold every century, perhaps every decade at this point. If we don’t always see it that way, it’s because we humans are designed to forget.
Still, part of me enjoys pondering things from a slightly fatalist point of view. It’s more fun to write and think about to push myself out of my bubble. This is the idea that outcomes are predetermined, no matter what we do. We will keep progressing as a species and no matter how hard we try, our progression may eventually lead to our demise.
But wait, our demise?? I swear I’m not being pessimistic! In fact, I think this might just be exactly what we're supposed to be doing.
Why?
Because we have an innate desire to advance, to progress. It’s so deep that everything on a personal and societal level revolves around moving forward. We even invented things to help with that movement forward (i.e time). Without this forward movement, human life is not human life. It’s not enlightenment. It’s quite the opposite. It’s against our nature. It’s resistance.
We are living beings on a living planet. Living means growing, and growing means changing. Humans may assign a positive or negative label to growth depending on what it is, but growth exists in nature outside of these constructs. Nothing is still. Nothing is stuck. One can be still in the midst of progress, but one shouldn’t resist progress. (that is the old zen trick btw - don’t resist the storm. be still.)
So if progress is so deeply ingrained in our human psyche, and we’ve designed a society that ticks forward moment by moment, where are we headed?
Reality is not linear
The right question to ask actually is “where are we returning to?” because true reality is not linear. The only things in this life that are linear are man made concepts. Take *time* for example. Time begets our concept of death, meaning the way we think about death as an event or an endpoint arises from our experience of time. Reality is a circle, not a line.
We all like to believe there’s a utopia at the end of this path. How could we not? We need that belief. A world of no death, no disease, unlimited money. A world without pain, a world without darkness. The catch is that this world doesn’t and never will fully exist because pain gives birth to love, lightness to darkness, joy and sorrow, creation and destruction, and so on. Each one contains the seed of the other and should be viewed as one whole, or “mandala,” a circle of wholeness.
“You need me.” as the Joker famously put.
So what’s all this fuss I keep going on about destroying ourselves then?
Well, if reality is viewed through the lens of a mandala, then our progress also contains the seeds of our destruction. We may destined to destroy ourselves. That’s not bad, though. That gives way for rebirth.
The beauty of this perspective is that it’s the most concrete evidence that points to life after death. If we don’t believe in cycles, of mandalas, then we either believe that 1) humans will keep progressing for the rest of eternity or 2) we’ll simply vanish into thin air one day.
I don’t think either are true, because #1 implies reality is linear, and #2 implies there’s an ending to the universe and endings don’t exist in a non-linear dimension.
The idea that things start and end is a false reality, made by us. Things don’t end. They cycle.
Contributing to progress is your way of contributing to this natural cycle.
Resisting progress is resisting reality.
The true essence of life is change. Progress is change.
And death is the start of something new, not the end.
You know the universe is expanding, right? Take that with you the next time you look at the stars. Where are they going? Where are we going? Is the end of the universe actually, us?
— @jclintandrews on X
“for a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself…”