I am longtime devotee of the God of Progress. Forward is good. More is better. Faster means I’m winning. If something hurts, it’s probably growth. If something feels empty, well, that is just the price of forward motion.

Up until recently I did not think of my devotion to progress as an allegiance to a particular mythology. I took it to be reality. Like gravity. Like time. I bought into it early and enthusiastically. Progress meant saying yes to opportunities even when they made me feel slightly sick. It meant treating rest as a reward I earned later and contentment as a suspicious emotion that might slow me down.

In my book Easy Street: A Story of Redemption From Myself, I wrote that I consistently began each day “with a self-administered psychic cattle prod designed to shock me into the forward propulsion I convinced myself was purpose.”

Progress and purpose promised a payoff. That was the deal. Endure now, arrive later. The problem is that “later” is a mirage that keeps walking backward.

At some point, I began to notice that many of the things I had labeled as progress had quietly made my life smaller. More efficient, yes. More impressive on paper, maybe. But thinner. Narrower. Tighter in the body.

On my podcast 50 Words for Snow, where my cohost Emily........

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