I was once accosted at my own front door by someone collecting for a charity. It was probably a worthwhile one. At the time, I was receiving housing benefit and visiting the Job Centre so punctually you would assume I worked there part-time. I didn’t. I received a jobseeker’s allowance while I sought a job. Unfortunately, this lady had decided to introduce herself to me at a time when I had no excess money. But, I was the kind of person who wouldn’t be able to get a job because I had no self-confidence to win at interviews. My wife-to-be had to rescue me by telling the lady in the nicest way possible that this conversation was merely going to go around in circles and there was no way a donation would be made today, no matter the insistence.
But I remain confronted by the simple challenge; being asked if I want to “make the world a better place.”
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I find myself frequently trapped in a conversation I did not initiate—usually outside Moorgate’s new Elizabeth Line entrance, where my pathological inability to make eye contact is interpreted by clipboard-wielding activists as a silent plea for interaction. It is here, cornered by a youth who mistakes my social paralysis for consent, that I am asked the same question.
The question is terrifying. It is raining, and they seem entirely unaware that the weather has already disproved their premise.
To answer it requires a level of teleological optimism that I simply do not possess. We are told history is an upward curve, a linear ascent toward a “best life” powered by rhyming affirmations. We are instructed to “reach for the stars,” ignoring that the sun is a star actively attempting to incinerate the planet.
I watch people make stationary choices, and I feel a grim responsibility to intervene. Starting with my aversion to paper diaries, given that it is now 2026 and we are still slaughtering trees to record the fact that we have a dentist appointment in Croydon. If progress is a machine, it is currently making a very expensive grinding noise.
Arthur Dent famously said, “I’ve gone off the idea of progress. It’s overrated.” I am channelling the Arthur Dent in all of us—the man lying in the mud because he has realised that the “path of progress” is usually just a very large bulldozer headed for his front door. It is a position of principled, albeit damp, defiance against a movement that refuses to explain its destination.
We have built the Elizabeth Line—a multi-billion pound bypass through the crust of London—simply because the circular logic of progress dictates that “you’ve got to build bypasses.” It doesn’t matter where they go or whose house they remove; the machine requires the movement. We are building bypasses to reach the places we only visit because there is now a bypass to get there. It is a closed loop of logistical futility.
We have permitted Andrew Lloyd Webber to convince us that “Any Dream Will Do”—a fallacy that has eroded our standards to the point where we now tolerate feature-length movies of Mrs. Brown’s Boys. We are told we are “prodigies” for producing twenty songs that sound exactly the same, when in fact, we are just nailing our mediocrity to the door of The Palladium. Aren’t we, Andrew?
The audit is necessary because the data does not match the brochure. We were promised a crash of drums and a flash of light; we received a zero-star review of a Kardashian divorce. We were promised that hard work is a superpower, ignoring the reality that our ambitions are dictated entirely by the Historical Tombola of our birth. We mistake our luck for talent, forgetting that a dream of being a corporate lawyer is only possible if you aren’t currently trying to avoid the plague in a swamp.
In the coming weeks, I will be dismantling the various pillars of our collective delusion, exploring themes such as:
* The Physical: Why self-improvement is a futile exercise in bicep-curling a piece of rocket.
* The Cultural: How Darwinian evolution failed to account for the algorithm and the “Dish of the Day” pig that wants to be eaten.
* The Linguistic: Why “living your best life” is a mathematical redundancy.
* The Deterministic: Why ‘Hard Work’ is a luxury for those who won the Geographical Lottery.
* The Social: Why we trust three-word nursery rhymes more than science.
* The Ethical: Why “Any Dream Will Do” is a security risk.
I do not expect these audits to spark a revolution. I am a man who gets visibly flustered when a self-checkout machine asks if I’ve used my own bag; I am in no position to lead humanity out of the woods. We are all deeply disappointing, and everything we produce will inevitably fall short of even our own low expectations.
But cataloguing the decline is at least a hobby, and it might pass the time until the sun finally decides to finish us off. If the machine wants to keep grinding until the gears fail, I’m game. “We’ll see who rusts first.”
What follows are The Progress Audits.
