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It was dead at night. A cold one. A cloudy one. I lie awake, meditating on the anxieties of modern life, and our pursuit of progress. To me, progress was a concept introduced since young, since I started schooling. And back then, it was simple. You study. You understand. You get better grades. And the score will determine the progress that you have. A better score indicates you are progressing. A worse score means you have gone backwards.

For 16 years of my life, that has been how progress was defined for me. It was straightforward. I just had to study harder if I wasn’t progressing. And that was often enough. Going into the working life, I took that mentality with me, thinking working harder and harder would mean progression in my career and life. And higher pay and promotions indicated how much progress I have made.

To me, progress was linear. It’s constantly climbing that hill up. And everyone around me was doing it. But as I worked more and more, the needs of wanting more became unbearable. I find myself thinking of what’s next, and what can I work on, and the next moment, I am in a corner, fearing that the world will end. Anxiety and panic attacks have become very common by then.

Taking a step back, I thought more about what it means to ‘progress’ in life. Is it earning higher pay? Getting more recognition from peers and bosses? Buying a bigger house or car? The more I thought about it, the more it became apparent to me. This was progress towards an ego. An ever-growing ego that will never be satisfied by anything. A greed that knows no bounds and which, will kill me in the long term.

I realised the nature and meaning of progression. It isn’t only defined by results. Let’s say that you are exercising and you did 50 push-ups today. The next day, you only did 30 push-ups. By my old me, that isn’t progression. That’s regressing. And when that happens, I will beat myself up and think that I am such a loser and failure to regress this way.

But the thing is I did 80 push-ups. Why doesn’t that matter? That’s when I realized that I had got it all wrong about progress. We have been so conditioned to do ‘more’ that we perceived any results that fell short of what we did before, as an act of failure or regression. And that to me, became more unreasonable and irrational the more I thought about it.

And Why We Need to Rethink It

I wanted to rethink what it means to progress in life. And I realised that I needed to include other things in life. I asked myself the question, “If I were to die tomorrow, what would I do today?”. And it became clear. The last thing I wanted to do was to ‘progress’ by getting more money or material wealth. I wanted to spend time with my family, do my hobbies, and pursue my passion. Even if it’s just one day, I would do all those things without hesitation.

The path forward became clearer. Progress became more non-linear and not straightforward. I included things like having lunch and dinner with parents, wife, nephews, nieces, relatives and friends, being healthy and fit, and writing articles every day. I quit my corporate job. Mind you, it paid quite well but I realized working so hard for someone else is meaningless. And pleasing people I don’t like is certainly not bearable anymore.

It will be too late when I am in my 50s and 60s after retirement, thinking about the things I want to do and what I value in life. There’s no time such as now to get started. If you wait and tell yourself there is a ‘right’ time, you will never do it. That’s what I was afraid of. So, I took the plunge.

When I took the plunge, these things were core to my progress in life. Family time, sports & workout and pursuing writing as a career. In the morning, I will eat breakfast with my wife. 3 times a week, I will go over to my parent’s house and I will help my mother to send Dad to physiotherapy. And then, I will eat lunch with my mum, aunts and uncles. Furthermore, I will pick my nieces up from kindergarten if my brother is busy and spend time with them. And, I go swimming with them too at the weekends.

For hobbies in sports and workouts, I go for badminton 3 to 4 times a week. Before this, I always couldn’t make it due to work commitments stretching into the deep night. My aim now is to be healthy and fit, because I want to spend more time with family and friends. Every two days, I will do push-ups, sit-ups, leg lifts, squats, weights and cycling. All of these felt great. And I had the energy to pursue my passion in writing.

Here I am now, writing for a living. And I only earn a fraction of what I did in my corporate job. But I have progressed in life. I am spending more time with family and friends. I am the healthiest and fittest I have ever been in my life. And I like writing. The only problem I have is my income is not enough. Other than that, I love the way of life I have now and the progress.