When More is Not Enough
We live in an era of unparalleled material abundance. Compared to every generation before us, people in just about every part of the world are healthier, wealthier, better educated, and more comfortable than ever. And this is not just by a little. Yet despite this progress, or perhaps because of it, rates of anxiety, depression, and dissatisfaction continue to rise, particularly among the affluent. The Progress Paradox by Gregg Easterbrook (2003) begins with this unsettling contradiction: that everything is getting better, except how we feel.
The book opens by laying out the evidence that, on almost every major metric, life expectancy, education, infant mortality, nutrition, safety, and access to goods, the modern world has made extraordinary gains. These improvements are not speculative. They are quantifiable, global, and undeniable. The best overview I have found of this is www.gapminder.org, but you can find even more data at www.ourworldindata.org.
But progress has not delivered on its implied promise of contentment. Instead, as material conditions improve, expectations rise even faster. People adapt to higher standards of living, quickly taking them for granted. And with each step up the ladder, the sense of “enough” retreats further from view.
This disconnect is not merely anecdotal. It shows up in surveys of life satisfaction and in the growing mental health burden in many of the world’s most affluent nations. The implication is somewhat confronting. That more comfort, more stuff, and more choice do not necessarily lead to greater prolonged happiness or satisfaction.
There is also a psychological undercurrent at play. As the book points out, the human mind is wired not for sustained satisfaction, but for survival and vigilance. Evolution tuned us to detect threats and respond to scarcity, not to dwell in gratitude or celebrate abundance. And since society has progressed far faster than biological evolution, we are still largely driven by those traits. So even when external circumstances improve, our internal state often remains unsettled. The would-be ancestors who said “no thanks” to opportunity lost out to those who were always on the lookout for more.
Easterbrook explores how the those instincts no longer serve us in an environment of abundance. How the contemporary pursuit of more often leads to fragmentation of time, of community and of attention. The result is that even amid abundance, many people feel overworked, disconnected, and overwhelmed. The problem isn’t just what we have or don’t have. It’s what we believe we still lack.
These insights challenge the dominant assumptions of modern life: that progress and prosperity are linear, and that greater material well-being naturally brings about greater personal well-being. While the author concedes that happiness does indeed rise at first with improvement in material wellbeing, in strikes a ceiling just slightly above the median. But there is also a hint at something deeper. That our crisis of mental health and struggle for fulfillment may be less about what we’re missing, and more about how we’re measuring. There’s an important call here: perhaps its time to reconsider what counts as progress. To ask not only whether we are getting more, but whether we are becoming more. More generous, more grounded, more at peace.
And if the answer is no, it may not be because the world has failed us. It may be because the questions we’ve been asking about success, growth, and happiness are the wrong ones altogether.
The Curse of Choice
So why is there such a gap between prosperity and contentment, not just in society, but in our psychology?
One of the book’s central arguments is that the explosion of choice in modern life, far from liberating us, often overwhelms us. The number of consumer options, career paths, lifestyles, locations and identities available to us has never been greater. But with every increase in choice comes the pressure to choose wisely. And with that pressure comes doubt, second-guessing, and the creeping fear that somewhere, a better option was missed, that the other grass is greener.
This dynamic is well-documented in contemporary psychology. When people are offered dozens of options instead of a few, many become paralyzed. Even after choosing, they may feel less satisfied, more likely to regret, and more susceptible to blame themselves for not choosing “perfectly.” The result is not liberation, but anxiety. And this extends beyond material choice and is compounded by a culture emphasising and celebrating individuality and freedom. As Easterbrook puts it:
We have complete freedom to marry for love, but that does not mean the object of your affection will reciprocate, or that anyone will. When there was little marital or sexual freedom, people ached but did not necessary hold themselves to blame for rejection; rejection was often caused by the indifferent mechanisms of society. Today, in a Western world of total freedom, rejection is inescapably personal.
Easterbrook also explores the concept of hedonic adaptation. Which is to say, how quickly we get used to improvements. What once felt like a luxury becomes a baseline expectation. Our gains, however hard-won, become invisible. This leads to a treadmill effect: every step forward changes the standard by which we measure our lives, so that satisfaction remains forever out of reach. Just imagine if your great grandparents, at your age — who likely lived in a home less than one quarter the size, walked just about everywhere, had no television, holidayed in the same state, if at all, had children or siblings die of polio or pneumonia or were drafted for war — made a sudden leap through time and appeared in your life today. They could have hardly dreamed of the freedom, leisure, independence and luxury we now take for granted and yet still feel we are lacking.
Yet there is no moral failure in this. It’s simply how the human brain works. It took humans to the top of the food chain and allowed us to populate every corner of the globe. We adapt quickly, compare constantly, and crave novelty. These traits served us well in environments of scarcity and danger, but in environments of plenty, they backfire.
Layered onto this is a further evolutionary trait known as negativity bias. This is a tendency to notice threats and losses more than gains. It’s why news headlines favour the grim, why memories of embarrassment linger longer than praise, and why we often feel on edge even when things are objectively fine.
All of this helps explain the paradox: why so many people in safe, prosperous societies and circumstances report high levels of stress and dissatisfaction. Our minds are not neutral observers of our circumstances. They are pattern-seeking, risk-scanning, socially attuned organs shaped by millions of years of hardship, not a few short centuries of comfort and abundance.
And when that instinctive circuitry meets a modern world of constant news cycles, endless comparisons, and infinite options—it’s no wonder we struggle. This was apparent to Easterbrook and the research he refers to in 2003, well before the ubiquity of smart phones, social media and advertising algorithms that now deliberately target these instincts to hold attention and extract revenue.
Understanding this isn’t an excuse to give up on progress, nor should it be taken as reason to turn away from technology entirely. But it is a reason to rethink what kind of progress we actually need and how we can make the most of the resources we have at hand to accomplish that.
If abundance alone doesn’t make us happier, and if more choice leaves us less fulfilled, perhaps the path to joy lies not in acquiring or optimizing, but in simplifying, connecting, and redefining what it means to live well.
Countermeasures – Gratitude, Forgiveness, Purpose and Hope
Having laid out the psychological traps that undermine contentment, hedonic adaptation, overchoice, and negativity bias, the book then turns toward deeper forces that shape human wellbeing. Rather than pointing to material gains or social structures, it begins to examine the inner frameworks that make satisfaction possible in the first place. The field of Positive Psychology was at the time of the book’s publishing, in its fledgling state, but has since made a distinct classification of these factors as intrinsic and extrinsic.
Among the most significant is gratitude. The author argues that a grateful mindset—far from being a sentimental afterthought—is one of the most powerful determinants of lasting wellbeing. Gratitude recalibrates our expectations. It shifts our attention from what’s missing to what’s present. And perhaps most importantly, it reorients our sense of self, reminding us that much of what sustains us lies beyond our own efforts.
The book also touches, briefly but significantly, on the role of forgiveness, not as a moral obligation, but as a practical key to personal peace. In a world saturated with grievance and comparison, forgiveness becomes a radical act of release. Not just of wrong-doer, but most significantly of the agrieved person. It breaks cycles of resentment that otherwise erode wellbeing and relationships, not just with the people in question, but everyone adjacent to the grudgeholder. Just as gratitude frees us from scarcity thinking, forgiveness frees us from emotional debt, allowing both individuals and societies to move forward without being bound to every slight or failure.
Closely related is the question of meaning. Many people in high-income nations report feeling adrift not because life is too hard, but because it is too aimless. When basic needs are met, and every comfort is readily available, a new kind of challenge emerges: how to find direction when nothing is required of us. The book suggests that purpose is not something to wait for, but something to create, through greater responsibility, acts of service, and a willingness to engage in causes larger than ourselves.
This leads to one of the most novel (to me) insights of the entire book: that hope is not a passive emotion, but an activity. Hope is not blind optimism. It is the belief that what we do matters, even in the face of uncertainty. It allows us to act, to persist, and to care, because we believe change is possible, even if difficult. Without hope, the instinct is to retreat: into apathy, distraction, cynicism. But hope, as an action, as a deliberate choice makes our efforts seem worthwhile, makes gratitude durable, makes progress worth celebrating and setbacks more bearable, and is an important ingredient in making change possible. Afterall the only thing you can be certain of is that if you don’t try, it won’t happen.
These qualities, gratitude, forgiveness, purpose and hope may sound soft in the face of global crises or personal hardship. But in practice, they are among the few tools that help us navigate modern life with clarity and courage. They do not depend on wealth, education, or social status. They can be cultivated in any context. And in many ways, they are precisely what material progress cannot guarantee.
Where more has failed to satisfy, these deeper modes of living offer a different kind of richness. One not tied to accumulation or efficiency, but to attention, intention, and a quiet assurance that life, even when fragile, uncomfortable or difficult, can still be meaningful and fulfilling.
Tying This Into Our Project
Reading The Progress Paradox was, for me, both deeply affirming and reassuring. The book gives language and structure to ideas I’ve been living for years. Ideas that have shaped not just how I think, and Emelie too, but how we live. What Easterbrook uncovered with data and psychology with hundreds of references in 2003, we have slowly arrived at through reflection, experience, and intentional change over the course of our lives since around the same period. If only we had discovered his book back then!
It’s validating to learn that what often feels like an unusual life when compared to those around us, in giving away as much as we do, living well within our means, opting for slow over fast and not buying new, is not a rejection of progress, but a return to a deeper, truer definition of it. One that finds meaning in relationships, generosity, resilience, and joy.
The arguments in this book are not just personal or unique. They resonate with the work of Peter Singer, Will MacAskill, Hans Rosling, and others we’ve drawn upon throughout this project (see Resources) and to take a longer view, its worth noting that dozens of well known philosophers over the course of history have made similar postulations. And since the publication of the book there has been a growing body of research affirming that the intrinsic factors of giving, gratitude, connection, and purpose do have a far greater role in happiness and satisfaction than the extrinsic factors of wealth and consumption.
Finally, while The Progress Paradox is not the first book to make these arguments, it may be one of the most comprehensive and accessible. And for anyone wondering whether our project is too idealistic, or too niche, or too naive, it’s a reminder that the real paradox is not in what we’re doing, but in what so many others have come to accept as normal.
If you’ve followed us this far, I invite you to go one step further:
- Rethink what progress means in your own life. Add your comments below or contact us to share your thoughts.
- Try our Make a Change checklist and pick one shift toward intentional living.
- Consider making a pledge to donate regularly and keep track of it with Giving What We Can
- Investigate the impact your donations could have with the Life You Can Save Impact Calculator or see how we used it to select the causes we wanted to support.
- Join the conversation about what it means to live well, and what we owe each other in this fragile, beautiful world.
Let’s build a new kind of progress—one with room for joy, simplicity, and hope.