Progress Isn't Change
A practical way to think about making the world better when nobody agrees on “better”.
We live inside a machine that never stops moving. Stuff happens, the world shifts, we adapt, and our adaptation shifts the world again. That loop is what life feels like from the inside, and it makes one thing guaranteed: change is not optional. You can wish for a pause, a return to normal, a comfortable freeze frame. But the universe does not care. The real question is not whether things will change. The question is whether, when things change, it will be progress.
That difference matters because change is automatic. Progress is not.
If you want to change outcomes, you need a model of what produces them. In plain terms, the world is made of parts that interact. When you understand the parts and the interactions, you can intervene. Not perfectly, not fully, but meaningfully. This is why understanding is power: it lets you touch the levers. But there is a crucial twist people miss. Parts do not just “have” properties; their properties get shaped by the environment over time. Education, incentives, scarcity, norms, tools, trauma, culture, technology, opportunity, and the stories people live inside all change what a person is capable of and what they will do. A lot of what gets called “human nature” is really “human nature under these conditions.” So changing the world often looks like changing conditions. You do not always persuade a person out of a behavior. Sometimes you change the incentives around the behavior and the behavior changes.
The thing doing this modeling and intervening is what we casually call a mind: an agent that predicts, chooses, and acts. You do not need heavy philosophy for this. You only need the basic idea that minds are what make bodies do things on purpose. Minds are what make humans active rather than passive. And because minds drive action, minds drive change.
Change is a physical fact. Better is a judgment. You can measure change with a ruler, a clock, a bank account, a sensor, a before and after photo. But you cannot measure “better” without bringing values into the picture. That is why arguments about progress go nowhere when people pretend “better” is objective. It is not. People care about different things: freedom versus security, tradition versus novelty, equality versus merit, stability versus exploration, nature versus civilization. Even when two people use the same word, they might be aiming at different outcomes.
At the same time, humans do agree on a lot. Not because morality is universal like gravity, but because humans are similar creatures with similar needs. Health, safety, respect, purpose, love, and control over one’s life create overlap. But overlap is not alignment. Which leads to the first uncomfortable truth: a world can change dramatically and still not “progress,” because progress depends on who is judging.
So here is a definition that avoids the usual confusion. Progress is when an agent looks at the world after an intervention and judges it to be better than before. Two consequences follow immediately. Progress is comparative, because it is always before versus after. Progress is value dependent, because it is always better for whom and by what standard. This is also why “progress” gets abused. People use it as a magic word that means “the future I want.” But if you are serious, you have to say what you are optimizing for, and you need feedback from reality, not applause from your tribe.
Now things get harder. Technology increases leverage. A single person can now affect millions through software, media, finance, biotech, and automation. That sounds like progress, but it is really power. When power increases, the upside gets bigger. You can cure, build, connect, educate, and scale. The downside also gets bigger. You can manipulate, polarize, surveil, destabilize, and automate harm. Add a second trend on top. As people experience different environments, they become more different. Their values diverge. Their sense of “good” diverges. That creates the second uncomfortable truth: more change plus more diversity of values can mean less shared progress. Not because nothing improved, but because improvement stopped being widely recognized as improvement.
This is why the dream of progress that makes everyone better off is mostly a fantasy. You can absolutely create changes that help almost everyone. Public sanitation, vaccines, cheap energy, reliable logistics, and literacy are massive. But everyone? Probably not. Some people define “better” as closer to nature. Others define it as more control over nature. Some want spiritual purity. Others want medical intervention. Some want openness. Others want borders. If your definition of progress requires unanimous applause, you will end up doing nothing. Progress is not consensus. Progress is responsibility under uncertainty.
Even when intention is clean, consequences do not ask permission. You build a technology that saves time, it changes labor markets, shifts power, breaks a community, and creates a new dependency. You lower costs, you increase consumption, you stress resources. You make a system “efficient,” you remove slack, and it becomes fragile. This is not a reason to stop. It is a reason to stop being naive. The world is a network of feedback loops. You push here, it bulges there. Often the people who pay the costs are not the people who get the benefits. So if you are serious about progress, you do not only ask “does this work?” You ask “who wins, who loses, and how do we notice fast?” The moral burden is not “never harm.” That is impossible. The moral burden is to pay attention, learn fast, and correct course.
This becomes even clearer when you notice that progress without a destination is the only honest version for humanity. If you have a clear destination, progress is easy to score. You want to run a 10K under a certain time, you either got closer or you did not. For humanity, there is no agreed finish line. No final state. So progress becomes iterative. You act based on your best current model. You observe outcomes, including second and third order effects. You update your model and your values if reality forces you. Then you act again. People hate this because it demands mental flexibility. It is easier to pick a banner and march forever. It is harder to keep checking whether your banner produces what you claim it produces. But if “progress” means anything, it means this loop.
And this is where the real enemy shows up: the frozen mind. The mind that cannot update. The mind that turns discomfort into denial. The mind that confuses consistency with truth. The mind that refuses to hold contradictions long enough to resolve them. If you cannot change your mind, you cannot claim to work toward progress. You can only claim to defend a position.
So where do we actually put our hands on the lever? One of the biggest levers is capital allocation. If you want to shape the future, you do not just debate ideas. You move resources. Capital is a coordination technology. It decides what gets built, who gets time, which experiments survive, which people get leverage, and which incentives dominate. Most capital flows toward what is safe, what is fashionable, what has short term metrics, and what can be narrated convincingly. That does not automatically produce progress. It often produces optimized stories and fragile systems.
So what does progress oriented capital look like? It starts with time. Many of the best outcomes compound slowly: trust, infrastructure, talent, research, and culture. If your structure forces short term exits, you will pick short term problems and short term solutions. It requires skin in the game, because if you win when others lose, you will eventually produce a world that hates you, and probably a world that breaks. It benefits from permanent capital, because a Berkshire style holding company model changes behavior. You can hold through volatility. You can invest in capability instead of optics. You can choose projects that look dumb in year one and inevitable in year ten. It demands outcomes over narratives, because if you cannot define “better” operationally, meaning what you will look at, what you will measure, and how you will notice harm, you will drift into storytelling. It respects reversibility, because the world is too complex for all in irreversible moves unless you are extremely sure. None of this is ethics theater. It is robust strategy under uncertainty.
There is also a part people avoid because it is boring: thinking is physical. If your sleep is bad, your judgment degrades. If you do not move your body, your mood lies to you. If you do not have real relationships, you start believing your own propaganda. So if you claim you want to work toward progress, there is a baseline that is not glamorous but is real. Sleep. Eat like an adult. Exercise. Love people and let them love you back. Keep your mind unfrozen. That is not self help. It is maintenance for the only instrument you have: the mind that models the world and chooses actions.
And after all the complexity, the ending is still simple. If progress cannot please everyone and outcomes are uncertain, why try? Because the alternative is worse. If you do not aim at making lives better, you aim at nothing. “Nothing” usually means defaulting to whatever incentives are already running. Many default incentives do not care about humans. They care about extraction, status, fear, and short term wins.
Trying to make the world better is better than not caring. Refusing to update your mind while you act is how you turn “progress” into harm. Progress is not a destination. It is a discipline: judgment, action, feedback, correction, over and over again.
Disclaimer: I co-wrote this article with AI. The arguments and ideas are mine. The final structure, some phrasing, and some vocabulary come from the AI. The truth is it’s already better than me at polishing text, and it makes for a better reading experience.