A client once told me, “I feel like I’m not making any progress.” she wasn’t just talking about him livelihood And his personal development. It was something deeper – a permanent feeling of being stuck, on the sidelines, left behind, living wrong, constantly failing to move forward while everyone else seemed to be moving onwards and upwards towards a brighter future.
When I asked what “progress” meant to her, she hesitated. It’s one of those ubiquitous concepts that we use all the time without really interrogating them. She couldn’t really explain it other than to say “get better, move on.”
That moment illustrates something important about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Our self-stories do not develop in a vacuum. They are in constant dialogue with larger, culturally shared stories – stories about who we are as a species, how we should live together, meaning and purpose, and our place in the world.
As embodied, embedded, and cultured beings, we are deeply shaped by our culture and the grand narratives of our times. We can embrace them, resist them, or assimilate them without paying attention. Some of these shared stories have become so natural that we hardly recognize them as stories. And yet they shape almost everything.
They influence what we strive for and desire. They shape our ideas about right and wrong, worthy and unworthy. They determine how we think about agency and responsibility, freedom and equality, success and failure. They structure our expectations of ourselves and others. They often act as yardsticks and determine whether we feel good or bad about ourselves. For example, we may measure our progress by job title, salary, or influence; Or by our fitness trackers, the scale, the quality and quantity of our relationships; Or by how comfortable and at peace we feel in our own skin.
Other grand narratives that influence us are romantic love story, the gospel story of work, and Competition Story. These big stories can be creative, limited, or both. But before we can decide what we want to say yes to and what we want to reject, we first have to become aware of them. Identifying and interrogating broader cultural narratives – the cultural waters in which we all swim – is the foundation of meaningful self-story work. Let’s look more closely at Pragati’s story.
story of progress
Most of us assume, often unconsciously, that our civilization is – or should be – constantly moving forward. We hope things get better, not worse. Some put their faith in science and technology, others believe that humanity will evolve toward greater compassion. Collaboration. We believe that collective and individual efforts should lead to development.
But what exactly is progress? For many people, progress implies a steady, linear increase toward a more desirable state. It is something greater – more wealth, more knowledge, more freedom, more well-being. Progress compound and spread. It can mean insight, enlightenment, financial security, status, or emotional transcendence. It could mean equality. It could mean freedom. This may mean becoming more responsible stewards of our planet’s resources.
In other words, how we measure progress depends entirely on what we value. Politically left-leaning people may define progress as increased equality and social justice. Those leaning toward the right might define it as an increase in freedom, autonomy, and open markets. These competing viewpoints often collide, giving rise to the culture wars and political fragmentation that characterize our present moment. And for those who are very concerned Climate changeRecent decades may feel less like progress and more like catastrophe – a story of scarcity, greed and ecological loss. One person’s vision of progress may seem like another’s nightmare. There is always controversy over the direction of travel.
Belief in progress is always based on hope – the belief that a better world is possible and that we are moving towards it. The story of progress operates not only at the social level, but also in our inner lives. Personal development itself is based on belief in progress. we are committed Treatment, to teachReflection or healing because we believe growth is possible. It is dangerous when that hope diminishes or disappears altogether. We start telling ourselves stories of stagnation, RegressionOr uselessness. The future stops. We look back nostalgically toward an imaginary golden age, often filled with regrets.
Cultural critic Raymond Williams wrote, “To be truly radical means to make hope possible rather than to assure despair.” Most of us need to believe that change is possible – even if we feel lost now, we can find our way back later. Just to keep going, we tell ourselves that suffering will eventually result in growth. Even intellectual skeptics trust some version of the progress story. Without it, we cannot truly function.
And while survival is vital, the story of progress is not flawless. There is a shadow side to this. Our emotional investment in progress can be weaponized. In the name of progress, we are sold endless wellness, personal development and beauty interventions. We are sold countless technological efficiency upgrades that promise to save us time – only for that time to be swallowed up by more work and more sophisticated digital distraction. In the name of progress, nature has been destroyed, communities have eroded, traditions have been abandoned. Progress often comes at a cost.
Then again, we have much to gain from questioning the story of progress. Instead of blindly following it, we might wonder what definitions of progress we have internalized without paying attention. What assumptions lie behind our desire to improve ourselves? What do we consider an improvement and why? Who benefits from our belief that we must always move faster, grow more, achieve more?
hidden emotional pressure of progress
When we internalize the story of progress too rigidly, we create an exhausting psychological demand: that we constantly need to adapt.
Many high achieving people are burdened by this invisible imperative. If progress is linear, pauses feel like failure. Rest feels like laziness. The dilemma becomes a problem to fix. Thinking is a waste of time. Changing our mind or trajectory is a disaster. Aging feels like decline rather than change. We consider time to be a precious resource that should not be wasted, and anything that does not contribute to progress is a waste. The result is often burn out – Not because progress itself is harmful, but because we consider it a non-negotiable moral obligation rather than a possible way of understanding life.
The deeper work, then, is not to reject the story of progress outright, but to develop a more nuanced relationship with it. Progress may be cyclical rather than linear. Growth may require periods of stability, consolidation or even outright regression. And some things aren’t meant to be customized at all.
We need discernment: the ability to ask what kind of progress we really want – and at what cost. Our self-stories are never completely personal. They are shaped, controlled, and enabled by the grand narratives we have inherited. When we bring those narratives into awareness, we gain choice and the ability to self-author. We can decide which stories to keep, which to modify, and which to reject.
Our personal story begins to change the moment we realize that it has always been a part of something bigger. And perhaps real progress lies not in moving faster but in seeing more clearly the stories that are driving us forward.
