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Our personal self-stories are shaped by powerful cultural narratives about progress, work, and purpose.

The progress story gives us hope, but it can also create burnout and a feeling that we are never good enough.

Progress is not neutral; what counts as “better” depends on our values and perspectives.

Real inner change begins when we consciously choose which cultural narratives we want to live by.

A client once told me, “I just feel like I’m not making any progress.” She wasn’t just talking about her career and her personal development. It was something deeper – a lingering sense of being stuck, coasting, falling behind, of living incorrectly, of failing to move steadily forward while everyone else seemed to be moving onwards and upwards into some brighter future.

When I asked what “progress” meant to her, she hesitated. It is one of those ubiquitous concepts we use all the time without truly interrogating them. She couldn’t really articulate it, except by saying “getting better, getting ahead.”

That moment captures something crucial 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, about meaning and purpose, and our place in the world.

As embodied, embedded, and encultured beings, we are profoundly shaped by the grand narratives of our culture and our time. We may embrace them, resist them, or absorb them without even noticing. Some of these shared stories have become so natural that we hardly recognise them as stories at all. And yet they shape almost everything.

They influence what we strive for and desire. They shape our ideas of 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 of others. They often function as yardsticks and determine whether we feel good or bad about ourselves. We may, for example, measure our own progress by job title, salary, or influence; or by our fitness trackers, scales, 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 the romantic love story, the gospel of work story, and the competition story. These bigger stories can be constructive, limiting, or both at once. 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 the wider cultural narratives – the cultural water in which we all swim – is the foundation for meaningful self-story work. Let us look at the progress story more closely.

Most of us assume, often unconsciously, that our civilisation is – or should be – moving steadily forward. We expect things to get better, not worse. Some place their faith in science and technology, others believe humanity will evolve toward greater compassion and cooperation. We assume that effort, collectively and individually, should lead to growth.

But what exactly is progress? For many, progress implies a steady, linear rise toward a more desirable state. It is more of something good – more wealth, more knowledge, more freedom, more well-being. Progress compounds and spreads. It can mean insight, enlightenment, financial security, status, or emotional flourishing. It might mean equality. It might mean liberty. It might mean becoming more responsible stewards of our planet’s resources.

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In other words, how we measure progress depends entirely on what we value. Those leaning politically left may define progress as an increase in equality and social justice. Those leaning right may define it as an increase in freedom, autonomy, and open markets. These competing visions often collide, producing the culture wars and political fragmentation that characterise our current moment. And for those deeply worried about climate change, recent decades may feel less like progress and more like catastrophe – a tale of depletion, greed, and ecological loss. One person’s vision of progress may look like another’s nightmare. The direction of travel is always contested.

Belief in progress is always predicated on hope—the belief that a better world is possible and that we are moving toward it. The progress story operates not only at a societal level, but in our inner lives. Personal development itself rests on a belief in progress. We commit to therapy, coaching, reflection or healing because we believe growth is possible. It is dangerous when that hope wanes or disappears altogether. We begin to tell ourselves stories of stagnation, regression, or futility. The future closes down. We look nostalgically backward toward imagined golden ages, often tinged with regret.

The cultural critic Raymond Williams wrote, “To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.” Most of us need to believe that change is possible – that, even if we feel lost now, we might find our way later. Simply to keep going, we tell ourselves that suffering will eventually result in growth. Even intellectual sceptics rely on some version of the progress story. Without it, we can’t really function.

And while it is deeply necessary simply to keep on living, the progress narrative is not innocent. It has a shadow side. Our emotional investment in progress can be weaponised. 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 ever more sophisticated digital distraction. In the name of progress, nature is destroyed, communities eroded, traditions abandoned. Progress often comes at a cost.

We have much to gain, then, from interrogating the progress story. Rather than blindly obeying it, we may wonder which definitions of progress we have absorbed without noticing. Which assumptions are hiding underneath our desire to improve ourself? What do we count as improvement, and why? Who benefits from our belief that we should always be moving faster, growing more, achieving more?

The Hidden Emotional Pressure of Progress

When we internalise the progress narrative too rigidly, we create an exhausting psychological demand: that we constantly need to optimize ourselves.

Many high achievers live under the weight of this invisible imperative. If progress is linear, then pauses feel like failure. Rest looks like laziness. Ambivalence becomes a problem to fix. Reflection is a waste of time. Changing our minds or trajectory is a catastrophe. Aging feels like decline rather than transformation. We treat time as a precious resource that should not be wasted, and anything that doesn’t contribute to progress constitutes waste. The result is often burnout – not because progress itself is harmful, but because we treat it as a non-negotiable moral obligation rather than one possible way of making sense of life.

The deeper work, then, is not to reject the progress story outright, but to develop a more nuanced relationship with it. Progress may be cyclical rather than linear. Growth may require periods of stillness, consolidation, or even apparent regression. And some things are not meant to be optimised at all.

We need discernment: the ability to ask what kind of progress we truly want–and at what cost. Our self-stories are never purely personal. They are shaped, constrained, and enabled by the grand narratives we inherit. 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 revise, and which to reject.

Our personal story begins to change the moment we realise it has always been part of something larger. And perhaps real progress resides not in moving faster but in seeing more clearly the stories that have been moving us all along.

© Psychology Today