The Illusion of Progress: Language Games and the Myth of Advancement

When I upgraded to the iPhone 15 last year, something struck me. The camera was 20% better than the 14. The processor was 30% faster. But was I 20% happier? Was my life 30% better?

I started thinking about this after spending an evening scrolling through Instagram, feeling oddly empty despite being "connected" to hundreds of friends. My great-grandmother knew maybe thirty people her whole life. I have 500 Facebook friends and somehow feel more isolated than she ever did.

That's when I realized: we've been measuring the wrong things. We call every new app "revolutionary" and every upgrade "life-changing." But what if progress, as we understand it, is just a story we tell ourselves? What if the vocabulary of advancement has blinded us to what we've actually lost?

How Words Shape Reality

Here's something interesting: the word "progress" used to mean simply moving forward in space. A pilgrim progressed along a road. An army progressed through territory. The meaning was concrete and measurable.

Somewhere along the way, we started applying this spatial metaphor to everything else. Technology progresses. Society progresses. We progress as individuals. But progress toward what exactly?

This created what I call "Progress Grammar" - a way of talking that makes certain questions impossible to ask. In this grammar, more is always better. Faster is always superior. New automatically improves on old. Question this and you're a Luddite who "doesn't get it."

But what if we're not climbing a mountain? What if we're walking in circles, mistaking movement for progress?

Measuring What Doesn't Matter

Look at how we actually measure progress. GDP goes up while suicide rates climb with it. We have more "connections" than ever while loneliness becomes a public health crisis. We can access all human knowledge instantly but feel more confused about meaning and purpose than our ancestors ever did.

We've created metrics that measure everything except what matters. Likes instead of love. Productivity instead of peace. Efficiency instead of wisdom.

When someone tells you they're "making progress," what do they really mean? Usually that they're becoming more like what someone else told them they should be. They're conforming to standards that might have nothing to do with actually being happy or fulfilled.

The Addiction to Climbing

Wittgenstein wrote that his ideas were like a ladder you climb and then throw away once you reach the top. But we've built ladders everywhere - career ladders, social media ladders, technology ladders - and forgotten the point is to eventually abandon them.

We're addicted to climbing. We measure ourselves by our position on various ladders without asking where they lead or if we want to go there. Silicon Valley taught us that standing still is the only sin. Moving up is the only virtue.

But what if some things are better left undisrupted? What if constant innovation is just destruction with better marketing? I think about restaurants that have served the same menu for fifty years and wonder if they know something we've forgotten.

The Things We Can't Say

There are certain experiences our progress-obsessed culture has no words for. The specific emptiness of having everything you thought you wanted. The anxiety of being constantly connected yet profoundly alone. The sense that despite all our advancement, something essential has been lost.

Our Progress Grammar can't handle these feelings. Depressed despite material abundance? You must be sick. Lonely with 500 Instagram followers? You're clearly defective. Think life was richer when we had less? You're just nostalgic for a past that never existed.

But what if the problem isn't with the people having these feelings? What if it's with a culture that makes certain truths impossible to express?

I've felt this myself - the weird guilt of being unsatisfied in the midst of technological plenty. It's like complaining about the weather in paradise. But maybe the weather really is getting worse, and we just lack the vocabulary to say so.

The Forms of Life We've Abandoned

Wittgenstein used the term "forms of life" (Lebensformen) to describe the cultural contexts in which language games operate. Each form of life has its own internal logic, its own way of making meaning, its own understanding of what constitutes a good life.

The mythology of progress has convinced us that we've transcended all previous forms of life. We look back at our ancestors with a mixture of pity and condescension. How could they have been satisfied with so little? How could they have found meaning in such constrained circumstances? How could they have been happy without the freedoms and opportunities that define modern life?

But what if they possessed forms of wisdom that our Progress Grammar makes invisible? What if their "constraints" were actually sources of meaning that we've unwittingly abandoned?

Consider the form of life organized around seasonal rhythms, where each part of the year had its own character, its own challenges, its own gifts. We've replaced this with the eternal summer of air conditioning and the permanent availability of everything at all times. We call this progress, but what have we lost? The anticipation that made strawberries in June a celebration. The preparation that made surviving winter a community endeavor. The acceptance that made death a natural part of life rather than a failure of medical technology.

The Silence That Surrounds Our Certainty

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," Wittgenstein concluded his Tractus. But we've forgotten how to be silent. We've filled every quiet moment with podcasts about optimization, with apps that promise to make us more productive, with content designed to keep us consuming.

The mythology of progress abhors silence because silence is where doubt lives. In silence, we might begin to question whether we're actually happier than our great-grandparents. We might wonder whether all our options have made us more free or simply more paralyzed. We might consider whether the price of progress has been the very things that make life worth living.

But our language games don't give us permission to think these thoughts. To question progress is to be ungrateful for the sacrifices of those who came before us. To suggest that we might have lost something essential is to dishonor the struggles for civil rights, for equality, for basic human dignities that previous generations fought to secure.

This is the trap of the Progress Grammar: it makes it impossible to distinguish between the genuine advances that have improved human flourishing and the elaborate cons that have enriched some while impoverishing the souls of many.

The Courage to See Clearly

What would it mean to step outside the language game of progress? Not to reject all change, not to romanticize the past, not to ignore the genuine improvements in human conditions that modernity has brought, but to develop the capacity to distinguish between changes that serve human flourishing and changes that serve other, less noble masters.

It would mean developing what I call "progress discernment"-the ability to ask not just "Is this new?" but "Does this serve life?" Not just "Is this efficient?" but "Does this contribute to the kinds of relationships and experiences that make existence meaningful?"

It would mean recovering forms of life that the mythology of progress has taught us to despise: the form of life organized around craft rather than career, around presence rather than productivity, around being rather than becoming.

The Language Game of Enough

Perhaps the most radical act in a culture obsessed with more is to develop a vocabulary for enough. Enough money, enough possessions, enough options, enough stimulation, enough progress itself.

This isn't the language game of deprivation or asceticism. It's the language game of discernment, of choosing what deserves our limited attention and energy, of recognizing that in a finite life, every yes contains a thousand nos.

The mythology of progress promises infinite expansion, infinite possibility, infinite growth. But we live in finite bodies, on a finite planet, with finite lifespans. The language game of enough acknowledges these constraints not as limitations to be overcome but as the conditions that make meaning possible.

What Can Be Shown, Cannot Be Said

Wittgenstein distinguished between what can be said and what can only be shown. The deepest truths about human existence-love, beauty, meaning, the sacred-cannot be captured in propositions. They can only be demonstrated, lived, embodied.

The mythology of progress operates entirely in the realm of what can be said: statistics about GDP, measurements of technological capability, charts showing increased connectivity. But the things that make life worth living exist in the realm of what can only be shown: the way sunlight falls through kitchen windows, the particular comfort of a familiar voice, the satisfaction of work done well with one's hands.

We've organized our entire civilization around optimizing the sayable while ignoring the showable. We measure everything that doesn't matter and ignore everything that does.

The Return to Ordinary Language

Wittgenstein's later philosophy was, in many ways, a return to ordinary language-to the ways words actually function in their natural contexts rather than in the rarefied air of philosophical abstraction. Perhaps what we need now is a return to ordinary life-to the forms of experience that humans have found meaningful across cultures and centuries, stripped of the artificial urgency that the mythology of progress has imposed upon them.

This doesn't mean rejecting all modern conveniences or retreating into some imagined past. It means remembering that conveniences are only valuable insofar as they serve inconvenient truths: that we are mortal beings who find meaning in relationship, in creativity, in service to something beyond ourselves.

The question isn't whether we can go back-we can't. The question is whether we can go forward in a different direction, guided not by the compulsive need to optimize and advance, but by the quieter wisdom of what actually nourishes the human soul.

Conclusion: The Courage to Not Progress

The deepest act of rebellion in our time may be the decision to not progress-at least not in the direction that our language games have predetermined for us. To find ways of living that prioritize depth over breadth, presence over productivity, being over becoming.

This requires what I call "the courage to not progress"-the willingness to disappoint the expectations of a culture that measures worth by advancement, the strength to find satisfaction in repetition rather than novelty, the wisdom to recognize that some things are perfect as they are and need no improvement.

It requires developing new language games, or perhaps recovering old ones. Language games where enough is enough, where stillness has its own value, where the deepest human experiences happen in the spaces between words, in the silence that surrounds our certainty, in the acceptance of limits that makes meaning possible.

The mythology of progress has given us everything except what we actually need. Perhaps it's time to climb down from the ladder we've been frantically ascending and remember what it feels like to have our feet on the ground.