The Myth of Progress: What We Count as Improvement — In Plain Words

Epigraph

“Nature is only subdued by submission.”

Francis Bacon, “Novum Organum”, Book I, Aphorism 3. From Joseph Devey's edition: text.

What This Article Is About

Picture this: yet another round of corporate optimization proudly proclaims victory. A button was pressed, average wait times were slashed, but live human assistance was quietly amputated, and the tail end of the queue was simply kicked out into the cold. Did things actually get better? Well, that depends entirely on whose shiny slide deck you are reading. The word “progress” serves as a magnificent solvent for inconvenient questions: it deftly dumps calendar dates, marketing gloss, and moral sanctity into one undifferentiated heap. Here, “myth” does not mean a deliberate, brazen lie; it refers to a grand narrative—a tidy storyline assuring us that everything is inexorably headed toward a triumphant resolution. Specific technical achievements are indisputably real, but from the mere invention of the wheel or the robotic vacuum cleaner, it does not follow that every subsequent system update is automatically superior to what came before. The practical aim here is to learn how to evaluate change with a clear head, without succumbing to the hypnotic trance of triumphant slogans. It all begins with a few disarmingly simple questions: what exactly changed, who is footing the bill, and by what specific metric was this declared a glorious victory?

I. Fresh Does Not Mean Edible: Why Novelty Blurs the Benchmarks

Novelty is merely a timestamp on a calendar, whereas improvement is correspondence to a defined, articulate criterion. If something came into the world five minutes after the old arrangement, it by no means follows that it is more convenient, reliable, or fair. Stripped of an explicit yardstick and honest comparison, the word “progress” turns into an all-purpose bludgeon: one can use it to sanctify any dubious overhaul while reflexively smearing skeptics as unenlightened cave dwellers.

Take a hypothetical public office that ceremoniously abolished paper sign-up sheets and rolled out a mobile app. The owner of the latest smartphone with high-speed internet is thrilled: a couple of taps, and they are done. Another visitor, saddled with a feature phone or trembling hands, suddenly loses their autonomy and is reduced to begging strangers on the street to poke the correct screen on their behalf. A third visitor lives in a remote village and, for the first time, gains the ability to submit an application without an exhausting commute. All of these disparate outcomes stem from the exact same institutional tweak. Raising questions about accessibility is neither Luddism nor a romantic plea to return to birch bark scrolls; it is a sober diagnostic effort to identify where the new setup is limping.

In private everyday life, self-deception looks just as colorful. The moment someone drags home a hyper-engineered kitchen appliance boasting a hundred preset modes, their imagination blooms with fantasies of instant liberation from routine chores. The machine might indeed take care of some mundane hassle. Or it might demand a dedicated cupboard, ruinously expensive upkeep, and a fortnight spent decoding the user manual just to brew a basic cup of coffee. Until a tangible result is observed, expanding technical specs and genuine quality of life remain two completely distinct things. A new purchase does not have to be an unmitigated disaster to fall thoroughly flat on its grand promises of effortless living.

At the same time, a sober assessment has nothing in common with blind, nostalgic pining for the good old days. The preceding order of things may well have been monstrously clunky, unjust, or outright hazardous. Its vices do not vanish simply because the shiny replacement brought along its own brand-new birth defects. The comparison has to be scrupulously honest: the real cost of preserving the old versus the real cost of migrating to the new. Only then does the discussion cease to be a pointless shouting match between the cult of relentless disruption and the society of backward-looking romantics, turning instead into grounded work on conditions: what exactly are we fixing, and how will we verify the outcome?

II. The Grand Narrative: How Triumphant Press Releases Replace Fact-Checking

The myth of progress loves nothing more than stitching isolated, local successes into an epic saga of inevitable, universal ascent. Such a narrative arc can genuinely inspire scientific inquiry, education, and long-haul collaborative endeavors. The trouble starts when the triumphal plotline begins treating positive outcomes as guaranteed by the mere passage of time, writing off all collateral damage as minor woodchips in the glorious felling of the forest.

In a hypothetical office, several routine paperwork procedures were automated. Documents started moving across desks noticeably faster. Management immediately leaps to a breathtaking conclusion: since three operations sped up, total and uncompromising digitalization of everything in sight will usher in absolute corporate bliss. Any grounded objections from staff—pointing out that the underlying databases are riddled with errors, lines of accountability are blurred, and edge cases send the software into an unrecoverable tailspin—are dismissed out of hand as “a pathetic fear of the future.” The local success was real enough, but it was recklessly forged into an unearned hall pass for any subsequent experiment, completely unmoored from reality.

This same ceremonial myth loves pinning rigid labels onto everyone involved. In an instant, the stage is populated by “champions of innovation,” “drags on progress,” and “inevitable casualties of evolution.” It makes for tidy presentation slides, but it completely eviscerates critical nuance. An employee objecting to an opaque algorithmic performance scorecard may be demanding a competent, transparent tool, not a nostalgic return to the arbitrary whims of an old-school foreman. Conversely, an enthusiastic backer of the reform may be acutely aware of its painful tradeoffs. Once the labels are nailed to their foreheads, both parties find themselves defending caricature stances they never actually held, instead of solving the operational flaw at hand.

A healthy narrative preserves room for sobering conditions. Tomorrow might indeed turn out better, provided the goals are clearly defined, accountability is pinned to real people, and uncovered blunders are promptly addressed. Time by itself fixes absolutely nothing. Hope, framed this way, is distinct from a smug guarantee: it sustains action through ambiguity without demanding that we switch off our critical faculties. Nobody is obligated to sacrifice their everyday well-being on the altar of slogans whose authors cannot even articulate who answers for system crashes.

Furthermore, the cheerful march forward notoriously hates looking at control groups: what would have happened without our noisy, high-profile intervention? The metrics climbed right after the rollout of a brand-new corporate directive, and the architects are already pinning medals on their chests. Yet temporal correlation is not proof of causation. The overall workload might have naturally subsided, a more seasoned batch of workers might have stepped in, or the weather simply cooperated. On the scale of personal habits, one ought to at least acknowledge alternative explanations rather than hailing a single lucky fluke as the ultimate triumph of a new lifestyle doctrine.

Consider a hypothetical team that altered its daily meeting format and wrapped up a project ahead of schedule. Did the new meeting protocol do the trick? Quite possibly. Or perhaps the project scope was twice as simple, or the team had simply learned from previous stumbles. To determine what is actually worth keeping, one has to examine the operational joints: where was the lag actually eliminated, which specific piece of information arrived earlier, who found it easier to do their job? Boisterously declaring “we became more efficient!” flatters the ego, but it does nothing to explain the underlying mechanics. Progress that can candidly deconstruct its own modest nuts and bolts is vastly easier to replicate than an unexamined miracle.

III. Knowledge as a Wrench: Capabilities Expand, Wisdom Lags Behind

Francis Bacon directly linked knowledge with the practical ability to act. In the Novum Organum (Book I, Aphorisms 1–3), discovering causes and fashioning instruments are fundamental to investigating nature’s laws. Yet his famous reminder that nature is commanded only by obeying her immediately establishes firm boundaries: to produce an effect, you must reckon with objective conditions. This philosophical milestone offers zero guarantees that every emerging technology is endowed with inherent moral virtue.

A technical capability answers a dry, mechanical question: “What can we pull off now?” The question of purpose asks something else entirely: “Why are we doing this, and what price are we willing to pay?” A tool for instantaneous message delivery can distribute life-saving warnings just as efficiently as it spreads toxic nonsense. High-resolution optical gear can advance vital scientific research while simultaneously being deployed to invade personal privacy. A technical novelty broadens the arsenal of means, but it does not diminish the ethical burden of responsibility and proper boundaries by a single millimeter.

Take a hypothetical editor who adopts clever text-generation software that churns out drafts in seconds. Output volume can now easily be tripled. But if source verification and fact-checking remain at their old capacity, this shiny new assembly line may simply accelerate the distribution of unchecked fabrications. A genuine process improvement requires a delicate reconciliation of speed and quality. Sometimes the most rational payoff of an innovation is maintaining the exact same volume of work while saving human nerves and sleep. A raw page counter does not distinguish between rigorous insight and sloppy filler, and it says nothing about the actual value delivered to the reader.

Recognizing one's own limitations is itself a profound form of progress. If a researcher honestly admits that an observed effect holds true only under very narrow, specialized laboratory conditions, marketing executives will throw a fit: the overblown publicity bubble has burst. Yet in the currency of rigorous science, the picture of the world just became sharper and future choices sturdier. The progress of knowledge often curtails arrogance and deflates grandiose promises. It does not resemble the triumphant march of a conqueror so much as the quiet capacity to trim away excess, discard flattering nonsense, and conserve energy for problems that can actually be solved.

IV. The Gilded Façade: Why Refined Manners Do Not Preclude Arbitrary Rule

In the first part of his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (1750), Jean-Jacques Rousseau launched a biting polemic against the lazy habit of confusing cultural polish with moral elevation. His fiery essay should not be misread as an empirical demonstration that all literacy and learning are inherently harmful. What Rousseau laid bare was the chasm between external sophistication and internal servitude: the skill of speaking with florid elegance and decorating social rituals often does not dismantle dependency; it merely makes the chains softer, silkier, and far less visible.

Consider a modern, everyday equivalent: the relentlessly polite digital interface delivering a flat rejection. An online portal greets you with a lovely pastel banner set in a soothing, friendly typeface: “We value you, but your request has been declined by the system.” No reasons are provided, no appeals button exists, and live support was eliminated in the last round of cost optimization. The aesthetic form became impeccably gentle, yet the user’s disenfranchisement was set in concrete. This is hardly a reason to campaign for a return to snarling clerks behind counter grilles, but it is an excellent reason to check whether a courteous façade conceals any genuine mechanism for defending one’s interests. Care that cannot be verified in the currency of actual rights remains a fiction, no matter how flawless the typography.

Rousseau serves as an outstanding antidote to the conceit of judging righteousness by the thickness of one’s gilding, but enlisting him to romanticize ignorance is just as foolish. Relapsing into backwardness and rejecting inquiry preserves brutal customs just as effectively as advanced machinery can scale them up. The moral caliber of an environment cannot be deduced merely from server capacity or refined etiquette; one must examine the actual relationships between people. Fresh knowledge is invaluable if only because it furnishes the precise vocabulary needed to call out injustices that ancient customs had long kept comfortably off-limits from debate.

Hence, two separate questions must never be lazily collapsed into one convenient narrative. Do we now possess more sophisticated tools and scientific data? Without question. Has this automatically translated into less humiliation, cruelty, and covert coercion? Not necessarily. It is precisely the divergence between these two answers that makes rigorous investigation indispensable. If every technological leap is prematurely crowned with a moral laurel wreath, our standards of truth fall apart. If every new invention is demonized as an omen of civilizational decay, we forfeit the means to mend real-world breakdowns. It is far wiser to acknowledge the practical utility of things strictly within their operational scope, leaving grandiose fairy tales of universal moral transcendence to the authors of promotional pamphlets.

V. Enlightenment Is a Construction Site Without a Ribbon-Cutting Banquet

In his seminal 1784 essay, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?, Immanuel Kant established a pivotal distinction: we do not live in an enlightened age, but rather in an age of enlightenment as an unfolding process. At the core of his philosophical stance is the courage to use one’s own understanding and reason publicly, without constantly leaning on the guidance of intellectual guardians. This was a normative philosophical appeal rooted in its historical moment, not a standardized progress report measuring the maturity of all global societies across centuries. Distinguishing an ongoing effort from an accomplished state protects us from the silly urge to declare the final triumph of reason on an empty lot.

Suppose a hypothetical government agency proudly announces the launch of an online public feedback form. The initiative itself is a decent step. But the bare ability to shoot a digital file into the ether is hardly equivalent to receiving a substantive, reasoned response or securing the revision of a broken regulation. If the feedback portal was bolted on solely to tick a box in a quarterly report, formal accessibility has been disingenuously packaged as civic empowerment. What needs auditing is the rest of the operational chain: does anyone actually read those submissions, is there a protocol for making adjustments, and does an official face consequences for sending a canned reply? Only then does the process gain real traction.

Acknowledging that the work remains unfinished prevents us from belittling modest beginnings. A person finding the nerve to ask an awkward question of an authority figure may still stumble, feel insecure, and make logical missteps. An organization tentatively opening the floor to peer feedback will still trip over unspoken hierarchies for a long time. If we demand instantaneous perfection, every fragile, living reform is easily denounced as a sham. Yet if we hail the very first baby step as the ultimate arrival, all ongoing maintenance abruptly halts. A mature outlook holds both realities simultaneously: here is the small ground gained, and right beside it lies an immense stretch of unfinished work.

In personal self-discipline, this perspective guards against embarrassing smugness. Grandly announcing, “I am now entirely mindful and fully liberated from cognitive biases,” is inherently comical and sets oneself up for immediate humiliation. A modest acknowledgment—“in one recurring argument at work, I learned to pause a minute earlier, before I started yelling”—is unglamorous, but it is real and verifiable. It can be practiced without writing a manifesto about one’s personal spiritual elevation. Progress does not bestow a license to preach to the world from a high pedestal; more often than not, it manifests as a quiet readiness to acknowledge a blunder and an unwillingness to demand instant enlightenment from those around us.

VI. Endless Buttons, Zero Exits: The Showcase of Plenty vs. Real Capabilities

In the official conceptual framing of the Human Development approach championed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the analytical focus shifts away from dry macroeconomic tallies to the actual opportunities and substantive freedom of choice enjoyed by human beings. This orientation draws directly on the vision of Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach. It represents the agency's official, pragmatic policy framework rather than an exhaustive academic reading of Sen’s philosophical oeuvre. The underlying premise is straightforward: resources should be appraised by the concrete, real-life capabilities they confer upon an individual, rather than merely by what is cataloged on paper or tallied up as nominal purchasing power.

Imagine a hypothetical municipal archive that triumphantly reports: the historical collections are now completely digitized and uploaded online! In nominal terms, access has been vastly expanded. In reality, the scans are blurry, low-resolution images devoid of optical character recognition, the filing scheme is couched in impenetrable administrative jargon, and the search bar reliably returns a 404 error. Meanwhile, a neighboring repository put up only a hundred documents, but provided clean transcriptions, an intuitive index, and a functional search engine. For an administrative scorecard, file counts and raw gigabytes matter most; for a researcher trying to read the text, the practical value of the first project hovers near zero. Nominal availability and practical usability are worlds apart.

The same logic cuts through the illusion of consumer variety. Picture a supermarket aisle displaying thirty labels on practically the same detergent formulation. Such an array can offer far less meaningful choice than two clearly differentiated, honest formulations. The right to an informed refusal is just as vital as the right to choose: does an individual retain access to essential public utilities if they decline to hand over their personal data to yet another dubious digital service? Real freedom takes shape in the interplay between an individual and the institutional rules, not in the sheer volume of clickable options and promotional pop-ups.

The capabilities perspective does not hand out warranties for guaranteed personal happiness. You can provide someone with an exceptional educational platform, but they retain the full right to go fishing or read trashy thrillers instead. That is not a civilizational catastrophe: the freedom not to exercise an option is an indivisible part of autonomy. Creating an enabling environment and the individual’s personal choice must remain distinct. A school is valuable because it provides rigorous, accessible instruction to those who show up, not because it coerces everyone into the classroom under threat of penalty just to hit an administrative attendance quota.

VII. Sleight of Hand and Averages: How Statistics Hide Other People’s Bruises

Polished, aggregated metrics possess a curious talent: they can project an alluring aura of shared prosperity while quietly sweeping under the rug the very people who paid the freight. In a hypothetical scenario, average customer resolution times dropped by two minutes, and the department head is already measuring their office for a celebratory bonus. But the overall average conveniently ignores the rest of the picture: who is now left waiting for days, who was quietly dropped from the queue, and how many simply gave up and walked away? A sober evaluation demands peering past the gleaming summary statistic to inspect the hidden costs underneath.

Consider a hypothetical customer support operation that shifted routine queries to hyperactive chatbots. Predictable tickets are resolved in seconds, sending the average response speed soaring into the stratosphere. Meanwhile, the messy, non-standard crises of actual humans are dumped into an administrative purgatory lacking clear timelines or human agents. The dashboard is radiant with green success indicators, but genuine help for those dealing with complex emergencies has collapsed. The flaw in the report lies in a cynical narrowing of the operational scope: they simply wrote the inconvenient cases out of the equation.

The exact same distortion applies to labor distribution. The consumer bliss of instant, round-the-clock delivery may be subsidized by the invisible exhaustion of couriers and support staff fielding frantic queries from personal phones well past midnight. You cannot judge the reality of a system solely by the ecstatic review of a comfortable shopper or the private despair of an overworked courier. A fair appraisal balances both sides: who shoulders the operational strain, what are the physical limits of endurance, and who subsidized the convenience? When a sleek service relies on covert exploitation and the exclusion of vulnerable users, its glowing metrics are merely masking vulnerabilities that may emerge when the system hits severe stress.

Nobody realistically expects every grand reshuffle to shower the entire planet with instant, egalitarian bliss. Sometimes genuine advantages can land unevenly, calling for compensatory payouts, retraining, or simply an alternative detour. An honest discussion faces that friction head-on instead of reducing actual people to nameless woodchips tossed into the engine of historical momentum. Who foots the bill, for how long, did anyone bother asking their consent, and how can their situation actually be righted? Without those prickly questions, the noble “common good” only risks becoming a convenient cover for the cozy cartel holding the marker that sketches the triumphant upward curve.

VIII. The Ribbon Has Been Cut: Who Is Going to Mop the Floors and Replace the Gaskets?

Snapping commemorative photos and snipping a silk ribbon with golden scissors is by far the easiest, most glamorous part of any undertaking. What follows is unvarnished prose: regularly lubricating moving parts, squashing software bugs, training users, and untangling inevitable breakdowns. If the budget and calendar completely neglect these unglamorous chores, the announced triumph captures nothing more than a single afternoon—the day of the ceremonial launch. Genuine progress often looks less like a thunderous fanfare and more like the methodical, invisible, high-quality maintenance of what is already up and running.

In a hypothetical district, engineers installed an ultra-modern, computer-controlled heating plant. At the inauguration ceremony, local dignitaries beamed and the chrome pipes sparkled. A year later, the sensitive electronics glitched out, and qualified technicians and replacement microchips were nowhere to be found within a thousand-kilometer radius. The old district boiler was sooty and archaic, but local mechanics could patch it up with a pipe wrench in thirty minutes in the dead of winter. That is hardly an argument to smash the digital controls and retreat to burning firewood in barrels. It is, however, a reminder that one must never compare a pristine architectural rendering with real, worn-out infrastructure while conveniently omitting the ongoing costs of mechanics, scheduled maintenance, and backup bypass lines.

In the realm of knowledge and research, maintenance means fact-checking and the willingness to acknowledge errors. A fresh empirical study refines an established theory, an archivist unearths a mistaken document attribution, an author overhauls a chapter following rigorous peer feedback. This is the normal, healthy respiration of honest thought, not an excuse for public panic. Yet to declare the correction of mistakes an “unacceptable blow to organizational prestige” just to save face is to elevate public relations far above the truth. A mature institutional culture is unafraid of spotting defects and maintains a transparent audit trail of its revisions.

Moreover, maintenance requires a sane tempo. When new regulations and procedural manuals are fired off like rounds from a machine gun, the entire system loses the cognitive bandwidth to digest the consequences of its own frantic tinkering. The tally of completed checkboxes swells, while common sense is drained away completely. Sometimes the most radically progressive step an organization can take is to hit the emergency brakes, declare a temporary moratorium on novel rollouts, and calmly service what has already been built. Such a pause is not a cowardly surrender; it is one of the few reliable ways to preserve institutional sanity. Truly mature progress knows how to speak not only of construction, but also of repair, routine preservation, and the timely mothballing of ventures that simply failed to prove their worth.

IX. The Dhammapada vs. The Quarterly Report: Quiet Minds and Restless Metrics

Not all traditions measure human advancement through the lenses of consumption statistics and the sheer multiplication of specialized gadgets. In verses 223–234 of the Dhammapada, the focus is firmly on conquering anger, cultivating truthful speech, and practicing disciplined restraint of body, speech, and mind. This is a Buddhist religious path oriented toward a spiritual goal of liberation. It is absurd to drag these verses out of context to serve as a blueprint for modern socioeconomic development programs; nevertheless, juxtaposing them helps bring a different question into focus: did anger, dishonesty, and harmful deeds actually recede? The mere accumulation of external toys provides zero assurance that they did.

Suppose a hypothetical debater devours rhetoric manuals, memorizes encyclopedic references, and masters the art of shredding intellectual adversaries with razor-sharp sarcasm. Technically speaking, their communicative prowess has increased exponentially: they regularly win arguments on points. But if the discussion degenerated into sadistic mockery, while the underlying capacity to actually hear an interlocutor completely atrophied, then from an ethical standpoint no improvement took place whatsoever. An alternative coordinate system will inevitably ask: did this exchange diminish malice, and did it foster clarity? This is a modern ethical reading, not an excuse to polish an imaginary halo over one's head for holding back a single petty comment on social media.

Yet this same brand of healthy skepticism must be turned squarely against romantic platitudes regarding “spiritual growth.” An individual can spend hours spinning poetic yarns about unconditional love and radical non-attachment while casually dodging basic domestic obligations, defaulting on debts, and abandoning loved ones in moments of crisis. Flowery esoteric jargon requires rigorous verification through concrete actions just as strictly as any corporate report. A pious facial expression and a hushed, gentle voice are hardly guarantees of wisdom; performative tranquility can be a cloak for disengagement. What gets evaluated is not a serene posture, but the track record of real-world conduct.

External comfort and inner maturity have no reason to wage a war of mutual annihilation. A reliable tool can liberate precious time for genuine care, while an ethical foundation dictates how that tool will actually be deployed. A person’s financial resources may grow, but dilemmas of conscience will not politely evaporate as a result. It is ridiculous to expect a modern gadget to transform its owner into a saint, yet it is just as hypocritical to prescribe meditation on an empty stomach to communities desperately lacking clean drinking water and basic medicines. Meaningful improvement happens at the intersection: what possibilities does the material environment afford, and how does the human being navigate that freedom in relation to themselves and those around them?

Furthermore, genuine growth does not always take the shape of an infinitely ballooning enterprise. A hypothetical craftsman might decide to accept fewer commissions, but resolves to execute each of them impeccably and without delay. An organization might strip away half of its convoluted software features, making the core functions rock-solid and intuitive. A family might decide to scrap an obligatory, ostentatious holiday banquet with semi-strangers in favor of a quiet, restful evening at home. In these everyday scenes, the formal, quantitative metric dropped, yet the actual quality of life surged. Asking what constitutes “enough” helps us notice the precise tipping point where mindless expansion turns into frantic wheel-spinning that cannibalizes the original purpose.

This directly involves the sacred right to declare a project finished. An initiative can honorably resolve its specific, localized mission and simply conclude, rather than morphing into a self-perpetuating bureaucratic leviathan out of sheer institutional inertia. If every modest achievement is held hostage to a mandatory requirement of infinite scaling, people lose the ability to actually enjoy the fruits of their hard labor. In an individual’s life, this can ease the exhausting race of perpetual self-optimization: a person ceases to view themselves as a condemned construction site and earns the right to live peacefully, choosing to adjust only what genuinely requires repair.

X. Shedding Rose-Colored Glasses Without Losing Heart: Hope Without Warranties

Abandoning a childish faith in automatic progress is by no means an invitation to lie down, stare at the ceiling, and drown in despair. It is simply shifting our center of gravity away from the abstract “arc of history” and placing it squarely back into our own hands: into our capacity to think, negotiate, and correct our own mistakes. Concrete improvements have distinct boundaries, and they can prove fragile or reversible. That is precisely why they deserve deliberate, protective care. If we convince ourselves that a bright future is guaranteed by ironclad evolutionary laws, we can safely skip the maintenance—right up until the ceiling collapses on our heads.

One can appreciate the practical utility of a specific technology without crowning it as a secular savior. One can champion an institutional reform without silencing those who had their toes stepped on during the rollout. One can wind down an initiative that failed to live up to its promises without theatrical hysterics and without declaring all human inquiry to be a waste of time. There is little grandstanding in such a posture, but it carries a great deal of adult responsibility. It cleanly separates the objective from the instruments, and verifiable outcomes from wishful daydreams. And the subsequent step is taken not to keep an abstract myth alive, but to get a concrete job done.

Let us return to that hypothetical office with the new software, where some gained speed while others were cut off from service. The choice no longer reduces to an absurd false dilemma: “Are you for innovation, or are you fighting for the Stone Age?” If a proper review has taken place, we can pinpoint exactly what accelerated, who was cut off from access, and what the initial report swept under the rug. Now we can preserve the effective algorithm, restore access for vulnerable users, and refine the procedural rules. And if the whole enterprise turns out to not be worth the trouble, we can quietly shelve it. The word “better” acquires real weight only when it is tied to an honest standard of measure and living, breathing human beings.

Grand, inspiring narratives are wonderful, provided they offer a vision of what to strive for rather than stripping away our right to scrutinize present realities. The myth of progress is useful as an invitation to roll up our sleeves, but it is utterly disastrous when treated as an all-inclusive excuse for arbitrary carelessness. Genuine improvement requires honest witnesses, rigorous comparisons, relentless maintenance, and the uninhibited right to say “no.” The future owes nobody anything. It is an open terrain where people still have to figure out what is worth preserving, what needs rebuilding, and by what unmistakable signs they will recognize whether life has become just a little bit more humane.

What This Means in Practice

Here are voluntary approaches for thinking through changes with a clear head—offered without imposing rigid protocols or mandatory performance indicators:

Establish your measuring stick beforehand. Pick one concrete change—a newly minted office procedure, a smartphone app, or an everyday habit. Settle on the core criterion before evaluating: are we trying to improve raw speed, universal accessibility, workload reduction, predictability, or peace of mind? If multiple criteria are in play, acknowledge their natural tensions upfront: what speeds up workflow for a supervisor can easily turn into a nightmare for an assistant, and packing a dashboard with extra functions often destroys basic usability.
Compare across an identical scope. Do not pit a scuffed, long-suffering existing arrangement against the pristine, idealized mock-up of a new proposal. Factor in software glitches, ongoing maintenance expenses, and the individuals who were quietly shown the door during the transition. For personal matters, a handful of candid notebook entries will do; for institutional initiatives, proper systemic observations are essential. If comprehensive data is missing, hold back the fanfare: acknowledge the localized shift while keeping overall claims of benefit firmly on probation.
Audit the true price of admission. Clearly identify the transition costs and name who is paying for them out of pocket. How much time will onboarding swallow? What will ongoing repairs cost? Is there a fallback plan when the system goes offline? Does an individual retain the ability to opt out of the service without forfeiting essential rights or basic access? Asking these questions is not an act of sabotage; it is simply clarifying the true price of the ticket.
Leave an exit route and schedule a check-in. Set a reasonable deadline and clear conditions for a review: what specific observations will confirm that the idea actually worked, what will serve as a trigger to overhaul it, and who is specifically responsible for doing the repairs? Avoid demanding impossible perfection, but preserve the technical and procedural capability to roll back the experiment if it starts running off the rails.
Acknowledge partial outcomes. Resist the temptation to stretch a localized win into a grandiose narrative about the entire organization or your personal character. A database can become significantly faster while remaining thoroughly unintuitive; a communication technique can defuse a tense office confrontation without turning you into an enlightened sage. Intellectual modesty in drawing conclusions does not extinguish the drive to improve—it simply shields common sense from the bitter hangover that inevitably follows another round of advertising illusions.

Key Quotation

“We do not live in an enlightened age, but in an age of enlightenment.”

Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”, 1784, paragraph on the enlightened age. English wording adapted from the shortened Russian rendering based on Mary J. Gregor’s English translation: source. The distinction between an ongoing process and an accomplished state is preserved; this is not a characterization of all twenty-first-century societies.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Comparison	Similarity	Boundary
Bacon, I.1–3 ↔ Rousseau, Part I	Both interrogate the relationship between knowledge and human life.	The expansion of human capability in Bacon and the moral critique in Rousseau pursue fundamentally different aims.
Kant, “Enlightenment” ↔ UNDP, Human Development	Both emphasize human agency and real, substantive capabilities.	Philosophical autonomy is not identical to the contemporary capabilities framework; no historical causal connection is claimed.
Rousseau ↔ Critique of the polished interface	An exquisite form can leave an underlying state of dependency entirely intact.	The contemporary digital scene is an authorial analogy, not an empirical conclusion drawn by Rousseau regarding technology.
The Dhammapada, 223–234 ↔ Technical optimization	The moral quality of an action cannot be evaluated solely by the abundance of available tools.	Spiritual liberation and technical efficiency possess fundamentally distinct ultimate ends.
Kant, process of enlightenment ↔ Reviewing a new system	Taking a first step is not equivalent to having arrived at an accomplished state.	A local systemic audit does not measure universal historical progress.

Sources and Research

Francis Bacon. “Novum Organum”, Book I, Aphorisms 1–3, Joseph Devey edition. Selected aphorisms addressing knowledge, the power to act, and the constraints of nature.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “Discourse on the Sciences and Arts”, 1750, Part I, translated by G. D. H. Cole. The first part containing the polemical critique of the automatic link between refinement and virtue.
Immanuel Kant. “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”, 1784. Selected passage on public reason and the distinction between a process and an accomplished state; English translation by Mary J. Gregor, 1996; translation context noted.
UNDP. What is human development?. Official portal outlining the conceptual framework of human capabilities and choice associated with Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen, rather than the complete corpus of Sen's academic work.
The Dhammapada, verses 223–234, translated by F. Max Müller. Specific verses addressing the discipline of mind, speech, and action within a Buddhist religious context.

About the Authors

Andrey Zarinsh — author and founder of the United Wisdom project. Explores themes of inner transformation, the unity of traditions, intercultural dialogue, and contemporary spiritual discipline. Instagram: @andrey.zarinsh.

Maria Evilkut — co-author of United Wisdom. Alongside research, she focuses on testing these ideas in practice, observing how principles of unity and mutual understanding function in real-world human and cultural contexts. Instagram: @ilkutki.