Progress for Progress's Sake is a Trap

As I’ve been learning more about the evolution of humanity, something jumped out at me that I want to share here.

The period of time, or the transition that humanity went through when it moved from a species entirely devoted to hunting and gathering, to one that adopted a more sedentary lifestyle complete with farming and domestication … is known as the agricultural revolution.

It’s easy to think that this occurred like any other revolution you might imagine. A single generation of people decided “To hell with this nomad lifestyle, foraging for berries and exploring the world! I want to settle down and live the good agrarian life!”

But in reality it happened over thousands of years, and sporadically around the globe. Some books explore the questions that arise when you think about this at any length like … why did some groups of people make this transition thousands of years earlier than others? If the climate was the same … if similar domesticable plants were available, why did one area change and another didn’t?

And while those are interesting questions, which ultimately lead to long, drawn-out discussions of the Fertile Crescent, the proximity to other peoples adopting agricultural lifestyles, or available, habitable, optimal altitudes … a couple questions seem highly relevant today.

When you stop to think about the differences between a life spent hunting and gathering, and one spent with a home, a farm, a town, and community … you might inherently believe that the life of a farmer is easier and more leisure-filled than that of hunting and gathering.

But you would be wrong. And of course you aren’t the only one who held this thought as well. The people going through those transitions held the same belief.

“I will get to work less, I will be safer, better fed, and my family will have a better life if I make this change.”

And yet the opposite was true. As it turns out, we didn’t domesticate wheat. Wheat domesticated us.

Farmers worked significantly longer hours than they did as hunter-gatherers. Their diets were far less varied and less nutritionally rich. Their lives depended on the weather and the changing seasons in far more impactful ways. And now that they weren’t moving around, and they kept all their food in one place, other people suddenly became a threat in ways that had never existed before.

Nobody knew this going in. How could they?

People unwittingly embraced what they saw as progress, and we’re all paying the price for it now.

We don’t have to look far to see examples of the same phenomenon in our own lives, and in our businesses. When we grow our business because we dream of a brighter more successful future for ourselves and our families … only to see less of them and have our stress shoot through the roof. When we hire people to take some of our overwhelming workload, only to find that we actually have more to do, not less, now that they’ve arrived.

So how do we learn from ourselves, and from thousands of years of human folly?

The agricultural revolution wasn’t necessarily a terrible idea. It was an unexamined one. As far as early humankind is concerned, this took place at a time when nobody knew anything about nutrition, the weather, biology, agriculture, food storage, human nature, and myriad other important considerations.

But today we have far more information at our disposal. As you dream of the future … as you define what success looks like for you, and make a plan for how to get there … consider also what the costs might be.

The changing demands on your time. The stress that you don’t currently have. The complexity of your life overall. Progress is worth pursuing, don’t get me wrong. Unexamined progress, though, is a trap.

What definition of success are you chasing? What part of that life weren’t you anticipating?

Reply or reach out and let me know what the cost of progress has been for you. Additionally, share this with a colleague who is growing fast but hasn’t stopped (yet) to ask what the costs might be.