The Story Trap of Progress

You know that feeling. No matter what good stuff is happening in your life, no matter what you have to be grateful for - there’s still that uneasy sense that something isn’t quite right. That there’s more. That something’s missing.

No matter where you are, you’re never quite where you want to be. Even though you often can’t say where “where you want to be” actually is.

Most of us make sense of this in one of two ways. Either we treat it as a personal failing - we should be more grateful, we should stop focusing on the negative. Or we treat it as a virtue. It’s good to be dissatisfied, we tell ourselves. Life is about growing, reaching for more. I don’t want to get complacent.

The second story has become one of the core beliefs of society today. Being restless, always striving - these have become the marks of a serious person, someone making the most of life. If you’re not growing, you’re dying.

It all sounds logical and natural. It even sounds biological, like the way nature works.

Except that’s not how nature works at all.

Step outside and look at one. It isn’t in a constant state of growing or dying. Mostly, it just is. It may be young and still growing. It may be old and withering. But for most of its life it’s in the state in between: maturity. It’s living in a holding state, simply being what it is.

A middle-aged tree isn’t a young tree that stopped growing. It’s a tree that arrived. And having arrived, it doesn’t strain to grow for the sake of growing. It maintains where it is.

Now here’s the part worth slowing down on. The tree never once feels it should be further along than it is. It never lies awake sensing it’s doing or being something wrong. It has no nagging gap between where it is and where it ought to be.

Why not?

Because the tree has no voice describing it to itself.

That feeling of not-enough - the one that’s there no matter what’s going well - isn’t information about your life. It’s not the truth. It’s simply words, sentences, language.

Somewhere in you there’s a voice that narrates and describes your life as you live it. And one of the things it does, constantly and automatically, is run comparisons. This isn’t enough. You should be further. Look how far there still is to go. It measures where you are against an imagined where-you-should-be, and the gap it finds creates the uneasy feeling.

The gap isn’t real. It’s something manufactured. It’s produced by the act of describing, the same way a shadow is produced by a light. The tree has no such voice, so it has no such gap. It can’t feel behind because nothing in it is keeping score.

You can feel behind only because you’ve got a narrator that won’t stop talking.

This is what I’ve come to call the Progress Trap. It tells you there’s always somewhere better than where you are. That contentment is dangerous, a sign you’re about to slide downhill. That you can’t let your guard down for a second. And because the voice generating it never runs out of comparisons, the trap can never be satisfied. When you reach the thing you were chasing, the voice simply finds the next gap. The story resets. You think progress will close the distance, but progress just keeps the question open: what else do I need before I’m finally enough?

The fulfilment you’re chasing can’t be reached by going further. It was never far away. It’s just covered over by a voice describing it as far away.

The good news is that the solution is simple. But it’s not easy because you’re not used to doing it. You don’t fix this with a better goal or a gratitude practice or more striving aimed in a wiser direction. All of those only keep the voice running.

Instead, you do something much smaller. The next time the not-enough feeling shows up - the restlessness, the sense that you should be further along the path of life - catch what it actually is. Notice it is simply a sentence. Words. A comparison the voice ran, not a fact about your life.

You don’t have to argue with it or replace it with a better sentence. Just see that it’s words. The moment you see it’s words, it stops being the truth about your life and goes back to being what it is - noise.

And underneath the noise you’ll notice the same thing the tree has been doing all along. You’ll see that you’re already here. You always were. The only thing that ever stood between you and your life was the voice describing you as not quite in it yet.

What story about progress is separating you from your life right now? I’d love to hear it - or hear what it felt like to drop it.

If reading this stirred something in you, that's the whole point. And if you want a simple way to catch the voice when it starts up - and see your life clearly again - take a look at my free tool Nextla here.