Progress

vrs Setback

“Progress happens too slowly to notice, but setbacks happen too quickly to ignore” - The Psychology of Money

In 1960, a child diagnosed with leukaemia had virtually no chance of survival. Families received the diagnosis like a death sentence, often within weeks.

Today, childhood leukaemia has a cure rate of up to 90%.

This transformation - one of medicine's greatest triumphs - unfolded so gradually that most people can't tell you when it happened, who achieved it, or how many children are alive today because of it.

Yet a single pharmaceutical recall dominates headlines for months. A rare vaccine side effect triggers international investigations. A hospital error becomes a scandal that everyone remembers.

We live in a world where overnight tragedies capture our attention instantly, but overnight miracles don't exist. The most transformative changes in human history unfolded so gradually that each generation took them for granted.

This medical revolution reveals something profound about human perception: we've become blind to the most significant positive changes while remaining hypersensitive to negative ones.

Consider what this leukaemia breakthrough actually represents. Millions of children who would have died in previous generations now live full lives, have families, contribute to society, and die of old age instead of cancer. Entire family trees exist that would have been cut short. Parents who would have spent their lives grieving instead watched their children graduate, marry, and become grandparents themselves.

This didn't happen through one dramatic discovery but through thousands of incremental improvements: better diagnostic tools, refined chemotherapy protocols, improved supportive care, enhanced infection prevention, optimised nutrition during treatment. Each advancement seemed modest in isolation. Collectively, they rewrote the story of childhood cancer.

The same pattern emerges everywhere, but with a twist that reveals something profound about human attention.

A company's bankruptcy makes front-page news overnight. That same company's twenty years of steady growth, employing thousands and serving millions, barely registered in public consciousness during its rise. But here's the hidden story: those twenty years of growth probably prevented more human suffering than the bankruptcy caused. Every job created, every innovation developed, every problem solved rippled through countless lives in ways that never made headlines.

This asymmetry isn't just media bias - it reflects how human attention naturally works. Our minds evolved to detect threats quickly. Sudden dangers demanded immediate response for survival. Long-term improvements offered no evolutionary advantage if you couldn't survive immediate risks.

Yet in our modern world, this ancient wiring misleads us. The most significant forces shaping our lives operate through compound growth - so gradual we hardly notice, yet so powerful they transform everything.

Positive transformation operates through what psychologists call "creeping normalcy" - changes so gradual that each stage feels normal, making the overall transformation invisible.

This creates a profound distortion in how we understand progress and setbacks in our own lives.

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When something goes wrong - you lose a job, a relationship ends, a health issue emerges - the change feels dramatic because it disrupts your established pattern. Your attention laser-focuses on the disruption because your brain treats it as crucial information requiring immediate response.

When something goes right - your skills gradually improve, your relationships slowly deepen, your health incrementally strengthens - each day feels essentially the same as the last. No alarm bells ring. No urgent attention required.

This asymmetry creates a sense of blindness to our progress - our systematic inability to recognise positive change while it's happening.

This is often why pessimism feels so seductive, realistic and intelligent- it’s a lot more noticeable when the job interview goes badly as opposed to the slow building of professional reputation over several positive interactions.

Optimism operates differently. It builds slowly, compounds quietly, and reveals itself only in retrospect. The optimistic person doesn't get immediate emotional payoff for their positive expectations. They experience gradual satisfaction as good things slowly unfold.

The fact that you can't see these improvements doesn't mean they're not happening. It means they're happening exactly as significant positive changes always do - too slowly to notice, too quietly to celebrate, but too powerfully to ignore once you learn to recognise them.

The coolest insight from this isn't that good things take time - it's that good things are happening right now, too subtly for impatience to detect, yet too consistently for despair to deny.

Thanks for reading