Progress, so-called, makes us suffer because it teaches us to be discontent with what we already have. The discourse of progress is really the discourse of the product: which wants us to believe that we won’t be happy until we have it, and leave our old way of life behind. Simply put: too much of our lives are spent wanting — wanting more, wanting better. We don’t cultivate, grow, watch, enjoy: we howl, demand, insist, break, breakdown. Anti-depressants, porn, junk and random doses of health food, Netflix, and so on — the accoutrements of modern living — are the inevitable consequence of the inability to feel pleasure, the philosophical rejection of everything that is given. Life is short, often tragic, but it does not have to be so petty and stupid; I tell myself this, at least, in a half-hearted attempt to wake myself up from a bad dream. The narrative of self-improvement, of consumerist pleasure — always immanent but never arriving — is buried very deep in my psyche, in all of our psyches. I mainly know that there are alternatives from reading old novels: Tolstoy or Hardy can tell me, in different ways, for instance, that a human existence can have very, very different rhythms from what the early 21st century knows. So can, for that matter, Proust or Joyce or Mann. Late humanism still saw the human spirit as something unfolding or flowering. Now, I suppose, the human spirit is a fancy houseplant we buy just so that we can post Instagram photos of our verdant apartments.

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