The Lie of Progress—and What It’s Costing

“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” —Aldous Huxley, Author of Brave New World

If you are old enough to remember the rise of the digital age, you probably recall the split: when paper photographs became pixels, when handwritten letters turned into emails and then instant messages, when music slipped from vinyl to tapes to CDs to MP3s to streams. Encyclopedias shrank into a search bar. Bank tellers vanished into ATMs, then into apps. Each shift was celebrated as progress, and “progress” became the story we told ourselves about every change.

But progress is not what we think. At first, it felt liberating: no more heavy photo albums, no more shelves of books. We saved files on hard drives, discs, and then clouds. And yet, after a decade, the habit of preservation dissolved. Today, our memories are scattered—emails buried in servers, photographs floating in lost accounts, texts gone with a broken phone. One crash, one password forgotten, and years of life disappear. Strangely, the old world—with its shoeboxes of letters and mixtapes—preserved memory more faithfully than our “efficient” systems ever could.

I’m cleaning out my room and find the same technical junk that never lasts: obsolete phones, frayed chargers, glossy boxes that once promised the future, now reduced to sticky plastic that makes me sick to the stomach. Worthless—unsellable, ungiveable, trash. Unlike the wooden toys and heirloom furniture of my childhood, these things were never meant to endure. They dazzled, then disintegrated. What we call progress is really entropy: a quicker burn, a faster decay, leaving us with less than before.

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A Historical Walk Through Energy, Money, People, and Entropy

Human history can be traced through three strands—energy, money, and values. In the beginning, they were tightly bound: fuel came from the body, money from the earth, values from survival. But with each leap toward “progress,” the strands loosened. Energy grew more abstract, money more fragile, values more self-centered. What we celebrate as advancement has often been entropy in disguise.

Ancient Civilizations: Tangible and Grounded

• Energy: Human labor, fed by food, powered economies. The system was brutal—slavery and serfdom—but simple: calories in, labor out. Waste stayed local.
• Money: Value lived in gold, salt, livestock—heavy, scarce, real. Exchange was tethered to physical goods.
• Values: Communities were hierarchical, but loyalty, continuity, and duty anchored daily life.

The Industrial Revolution: Fossil Fire

• Energy: Coal and steam replaced muscle. Output soared, but so did soot, heat, and waste. Energy became extractive, not cyclical.
• Money: Credit expanded beyond gold, fueling railways and factories—but also bubbles. Money began to drift from reality.
• Values: Cities swelled, traditions frayed. Workers became replaceable “cogs.” Profit displaced stability.

The 20th Century: Oil, Fiat, and Consumption

• Energy: Oil and electricity lit up the world. Cheap fuel powered cars, planes, suburbs—and with them, unprecedented pollution and depletion.
• Money: In 1971, money finally severed from gold. Growth was now fueled by debt and speculation, untethered from physical anchors.
• Values: Advertising redefined identity. To be modern was to consume: more, faster, newer.

Renewables: The Illusion of Green

• Energy: Wind and solar promised clean futures, but still relied on fossil-powered mining and manufacturing. They often added to fossil demand instead of replacing it.
• Money: Subsidies and speculation drove the boom more than resilience.
• Values: A culture of green signaling emerged—buying an electric car less to transform systems than to polish one’s image.

The Digital and AI Era: Speed as Decay

• Energy: Data centers now consume more power than nations. AI and crypto, marketed as “efficient,” are some of the most voracious technologies ever built.
• Money: Value has floated free—fiat gave way to crypto, “super-fiat” sustained by hype and electricity.
• Values: Attention itself became currency. Social media monetized distraction, fracturing identity into curated avatars while community dissolved into metrics.

The trajectory is unmistakable. From muscle to fossil fuels to AI—from gold to fiat to crypto—from duty to consumption to distraction—each leap promised progress. Each left us more fragmented, more entropic. What looks like growth is often only faster decay.

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Distinguishing the Mirage from Reality

If history shows how each step of “progress” multiplies entropy, nature offers the contrast: cycles of balance rather than acceleration.

In nature, entropy is a feature of time: decay and transformation are part of ongoing cycles that sustain life. A fallen leaf decays, dispersing its energy into soil, air, and microorganisms. Forest succession follows the same pattern: disturbed land—whether from a clear-cut or a fallen log—gradually returns to woodland. Through photosynthesis and biodiversity, energy is captured, cycled, and rebalanced. Growth and decay are never isolated events but parts of a larger system that sustains equilibrium. Nature’s entropy unfolds slowly, woven with regeneration. It spends—but it also restores.

Human civilization, by contrast, accelerates entropy. We create and consume at rates nature never intended, compounding imbalance through systems like usury. Perhaps this is why scripture condemned it as sin—and why it may yet be the cause of our undoing.

Consider the glittering promise of solar panels and wind turbines. Each stage of their existence—mining silicon, refining metals, transporting components, constructing grids—depends on fossil fuels. The illusion is clean energy; the reality is displacement of the burn. The system sustains itself under the guise of salvation.

Already, data centers consume more electricity than many nations. Cryptocurrency compounds the drain, devouring gigawatts to sustain intangible tokens. These technologies do not conserve energy; they accelerate its dissipation. They not only devour electricity but fracture attention and strip rare resources, dispersing energy at every level—material and human.

“As above, so below.” As currencies inflate and fragment, so do identities and purposes. Just as the dollar multiplies into weaker copies, our digital selves splinter into thinner avatars. The illusion is efficiency—less paper, less travel, less labor—but the reality is deeper waste. Orwell’s paradox of “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength” has a modern twin: consumption is conservation. We are told we save energy by moving into the cloud, yet in truth we only outsource the burn.

Look at the world’s most valuable companies: Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Netflix, Tencent. Nearly all thrive on entertainment, convenience, and distraction. Few devote themselves to food, water, or shelter—the true essentials of life. How can entertainment be worth trillions while its foundation—rare metals, fossil fuels, clean water—grows scarcer, costlier, and nearly invisible? It’s as if gravity itself had been declared optional, and we agreed to live in a market where spectacle outweighs substance.

Our money mirrors the same trajectory. Gold once tethered value to labor’s physicality; fiat severed that tie; crypto drifted further still—bubbles floating free of reality. The deeper the abstraction, the higher the entropy.

We have built a civilization that confuses spectacle for substance, convenience for necessity, and abstraction for value. Nature, however, obeys another logic—where energy circulates, returns, and sustains. Our systems sever that cycle, multiplying entropy instead of balance. But nature always prevails, and the mirage can last only so long before reality asserts itself. Even the Bible warned of man’s desire to be like God—our ancient Achilles’ heel. That hunger for dominion blinds us to limits, yet limits are precisely what nature enforces.

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The Real Human Predicament and What to Do

Which brings us to the real human predicament: not just that we consume endlessly, but that we believe the pattern can continue—and refuse to face what must be done.

I have begun to learn not from books or theories, but in my own yard. Instead of buying trees from a nursery, I watch for seedlings that sprout too close to the house—seeds carried by wind or birds—and replant them where they can grow freely. I’ve pulled out the English ivy that strangled my trees and replaced it with Pachysandra, a gentler groundcover. These are small gestures, but they remind me that balance is not a metaphor. It is an act of care—something the hands and body can practice every day.

Even in my home, I’ve found that less can mean more. Recently, I began sleeping on the floor with just a thin layer of padding. To my surprise, my body feels stronger, more awake, as though it remembers something mattresses made me forget. We were made for balance, and sometimes the body recalls it more quickly than the mind.

Even technology, which I critique so sharply, can be bent toward balance. I use AI and the Internet not to perform on TikTok or chase distractions, but to learn the names of plants, to study how to care for trees, to understand the rhythms of soil and growth. In this way, technology becomes servant rather than master.

The true predicament, then, is not only that we consume too much, but that we mistake illusions for solutions—confusing speed with progress, convenience with necessity, and spectacle with substance. We have built a civilization that multiplies entropy while convincing itself it is conserving. The danger lies not only in depletion, but in the belief that the pattern can continue forever.

And yet, nature offers another path. In forests, in rivers, in soil, energy circulates and returns. Growth and decay are not opposites but partners. Systems endure not by accelerating, but by balancing—spending and restoring in rhythm. If civilization is to last, it must learn the same lesson: to re-anchor technology in reality, to revalue what sustains life—food, water, shelter, relationships, meaning—above what distracts from it.

This is not a call to abandon technology, but to rebuild its place in our lives. To choose endurance over novelty, substance over spectacle, rhythm over churn. Entropy is inevitable, but it can be slowed, shaped, even made an ally.

The mirage of progress will not last forever. The question is whether we will wake only in collapse—or whether, while there is still time, we can choose balance over illusion.

That is why I write: to strip away illusions, to map the hidden costs of our systems, and to invite reflection on what it means to live responsibly in the world we have. If you’ve read this far, perhaps it resonates with you—and if it does, I invite you to help sustain it. You can support my work through Patreon, BuyMeACoffee, or Substack. Each contribution, however small, allows me to devote more time to research and writing, and to share it freely with those who may never be able to pay.

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References

Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance. (2025). Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI). https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index

International Energy Agency. (2025). World energy outlook 2025. https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2025

United Nations University, International Telecommunication Union, & International Solid Waste Association. (2024). Global E-waste Monitor 2024. https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Environment/Pages/Global-E-waste-Monitor.aspx