And maybe that’s not as bad as we think.
Benjamin Trinidad Segura
7 min read
We have a strange idea of progress.
It should move forward. As continuously as possible. Ideally, faster than yesterday.
Earn more. Achieve more. Own more. Experience more. Make more of ourselves.
And if possible, all at once.
Anyone who has less today than a year ago seems to have done something wrong.
Anyone who loses their job has fallen behind.
Anyone whose idea fails has wasted time.
Anyone who ends a relationship has lost something.
And anyone who has to start over suddenly finds themselves back at the beginning.
But is that really true?
We often view our lives as a path with only one right direction: forward.
One step forward is good. Two steps are better. Standing still is bad. And setbacks? Ideally, they shouldn’t happen at all.
But that’s not at all how life works.
We change. Our circumstances change. People come and go. Decisions turn out to have been wrong in hindsight. Things that worked yesterday may no longer work tomorrow.
And sometimes we lose something even though we did everything right.
Even so, we often see setbacks as personal defeats.
As if we’ve failed the moment our lives no longer follow the direction we originally imagined.
Maybe not every setback is a sign that we’re heading in the wrong direction.
Maybe sometimes it just shows us that our idea of progress was too simple.
Imagine someone who spent five years trying to build a business.
They invest time, money, energy, and perhaps a large part of their hope, too.
And at some point, it stops working.
The business has to close.
From the outside, you might say: Five years lost. All for nothing. Back to zero.
But is this person really the same as they were five years ago?
Haven’t they learned to make decisions? To take responsibility? To deal with uncertainty? To understand people? To solve problems?
Maybe they lost their business.
But did they also lose everything they learned over those five years?
The same goes for relationships, career changes, personal crises, and decisions we would make differently today.
Of course, we can lose things that can’t be replaced.
And of course, new knowledge doesn’t automatically make a loss less painful.
But after a setback, we may be in a similar place to where we were before, without being the same person.
Just because you’re back in the same place doesn’t mean you’re the same person again.
Much of our progress isn’t visible to other people.
No one can tell at a glance that you’ve learned to set boundaries.
That you handle conflicts differently now.
That you dare to ask questions instead of feeling you have to know everything.
That you recognize sooner when something isn’t good for you.
That you understand a situation better now, even though you still can’t change it.
We can’t simply put these kinds of developments on our résumé.
They don’t show up on our bank statements.
They don’t automatically bring us more recognition, a better job, or social status.
And yet they can change our lives.
Perhaps even more enduringly than some achievements for which we receive so much recognition.
Not everything that moves us forward visibly moves us ahead.
That doesn’t mean external outcomes don’t matter.
Money creates opportunities and security. A job can provide stability. Relationships can offer support. Success can open doors.
Anyone who loses any of those things may lose a great deal.
But our bank balance, job title, or relationship status don’t tell our whole story.
And perhaps we should stop pretending they do.
There’s this idea that sometimes we have to be pulled back before we can move especially far forward.
Like a rubber band.
A lovely image.
Perhaps even one that can give us hope in difficult times.
But I think we should be careful with it.
Because we’re not rubber bands.
Not everyone who gets pushed back then springs further ahead.
Not every crisis makes us stronger.
Not every failure opens a new door.
And not every loss has a deeper meaning that we’ll eventually discover.
Some things are simply awful.
Some decisions were wrong.
Some experiences are ones we wish we’d never had.
And some setbacks leave marks that stay with us for life.
We don’t have to turn every painful experience into a success story for it to deserve a place in our lives.
Maybe sometimes we’re simply allowed to feel sad.
Disappointed. Angry. Exhausted.
Maybe we’re allowed to regret something without immediately having to turn it into a lesson.
And maybe we’re allowed to wish something had gone differently without being ungrateful for our lives today.
I think sometimes we put ourselves under enormous pressure to make something of everything.
To turn every opportunity into a success.
Every defeat into a realization.
Every problem into a solution.
Every difficult phase of life into a story about how we won in the end after all.
But maybe we don’t always have to win.
Maybe we don’t always have to grow, either.
Maybe sometimes it’s enough to get through a difficult time without breaking.
Or to accept help.
Or to admit a mistake.
Or to realize that we no longer want something we once would have given everything for.
Maybe progress sometimes even means deliberately taking a step back.
Not because we’re giving up.
But because we’ve realized that the direction we’ve been moving in for so long wasn’t our own at all.
And maybe this is one of the hardest realizations of all:
That we’re allowed to let something go, even though we’ve already invested so much in it.
Maybe five years ago you thought your life would look different today.
Maybe you haven’t reached your goals.
Maybe you’ve lost things you were certain would stay forever.
Maybe you’ve made decisions you regret today.
Or maybe right now you have no idea what to do next.
I don’t want to tell you that all of this had to happen so that something better could happen someday.
I don’t know that.
And I don’t believe anyone can promise that.
But I believe that sometimes we judge our path so far unfairly.
We look at what didn’t work and overlook what we’ve come to understand.
We compare our present with a future we once imagined.
And call the difference a personal failure.
But we can’t know who we’d be today if everything had gone differently.
Maybe we would have achieved more.
Maybe we would have lost less.
Maybe we would have been happier.
But maybe not.
We don’t know.
And perhaps we don’t need to know.
Because our lives aren’t a test where we’ll eventually have to prove that every decision we made in the past was right.
It’s something we shape as we live it.
And sometimes that means looking at the path we’ve taken in a new way, without sugarcoating it.
Maybe things are moving backward right now.
Maybe you’re standing still.
Maybe you have to start something over, even though you thought you’d left this chapter behind long ago.
That isn’t automatically good.
But it also isn’t automatically the end of your growth.
You can be disappointed with where you are right now and still acknowledge how far you’ve come.
You can wish for a different present without devaluing your entire past.
And you can start over without pretending that everything before was for nothing.
Maybe some experiences will only become helpful later.
Maybe others will simply remain painful.
And maybe what looks like a setback today will eventually lead us in a new direction.
No guarantee.
But a possibility.
Maybe we don’t always have to be further along than yesterday. Maybe sometimes it’s enough to understand something today that we didn’t understand yesterday.
And if we want to take another step forward tomorrow, we can.
At our own pace.
Not because we have to prove that every setback was worth it.
But because our journey isn’t over yet.
Discussion
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