Making Progress in the Real World

Preamble

This essay is written for the agents of change—the people who see what is broken, imagine what could be better, and feel compelled to act. It is for builders, reformers, innovators, organizers, leaders, teachers, founders, investors, policymakers, and quiet custodians—anyone trying to turn “we should” into “we did” in a world that is, at once, astonishingly opportunity-rich and stubbornly resistant to lasting improvement.

We live in a time of immense capability. Tools multiply. Knowledge spreads. Networks form at the speed of thought. Solutions are proposed in every domain—health, education, infrastructure, climate, governance, culture. And yet anyone who has tried to implement real change knows the uncomfortable truth: progress is not merely a matter of having the right idea. The world does not automatically keep what we build. Good intentions do not protect systems from drift. Success does not guarantee durability. Even the best-designed improvements encounter friction—not only from politics and incentives, but from something deeper and more ordinary: reality’s default tendency to loosen what is not continually held.

What follows offers a broad perspective on what it takes to make sustainable progress in a world that often seems to work against it. It is not a tactical guide or a set of steps. It is a framing—an attempt to name the underlying forces that shape every serious effort to build, repair, and renew: the slow pull of entropy, the counter-forces of guardianship and co-creation, the fragility introduced by complexity, and the sobering truth that lasting gains require not only invention, but maintenance, renewal, and—at times—replacement.

Read it as a realism reset: not to dampen ambition, but to strengthen it—so that what you build has a better chance of holding.

Making Progress in the Real World

There is a kind of knowledge that does not arrive as a lesson. It arrives as weather—slowly, repeatedly, without drama, until one day you realize it has been shaping everything all along. You can be told, as a child, that metal rusts, that gardens grow weeds, that bodies age, that institutions drift. You can nod and file the facts away. But the knowledge I mean doesn’t live in facts. It lives in the felt recognition—usually late, usually reluctant—that the world has a default direction. That if you stop tending, things do not “hold.” They loosen. They fray. They revert.

Rust is the first tutor because it has no argument. Leave a shovel in the rain. Leave a bolt uncoated near salt air. Leave a car outside for enough seasons. No one needs to choose decay. The universe leans toward corrosion. The tight tolerances we admire do not persist on their own; they are arrangements we impose and maintain. The lesson is not that life is tragic. The lesson is that coherence is not the resting state.

A garden makes the point more mercilessly. You can plan it, build it, improve the soil, choose seeds, set irrigation, succeed—make it lush and orderly. Then leave it for a season or two. Weeds do not ask permission. Vines take advantage of openings. Pests discover you. What you intended is gradually replaced by what the environment prefers. Your order was not “wrong.” It simply was not the default. The garden is never “done.” It can be thriving, but not finished.

If you want to see entropy in human systems, you don’t need a microscope. Walk into any office that has been “too busy” to reorganize. Papers pile. Folders multiply. Labels become approximations. Rules accrete. Exceptions become policy. The most recent workaround becomes the operating system. No one planned it. No one intended the drift. It is what happens when maintenance becomes intermittent and clarity becomes optional, and the pressure of the day crowds out the discipline of renewal. Without custodians, founders become paperwork.

And then there is the body: the personal version of the same law. Every body is a daily revolt against entropy. We regulate temperature, repair cells, clear waste, fight infection, sleep to re-stabilize a brain that drifts in its chemistry—so constantly that we call it “normal.” Then one day the body stops being a quiet miracle and begins to feel like a negotiation. Recovery takes longer. Sleep becomes less generous. A small misstep becomes weeks of pain. Aging is not only decline; it is the moment when entropy becomes visible.

Bridges are honest artifacts because they reveal what our lives often conceal: the difference between slow drift and sudden collapse. A bridge can look fine right up to the moment it isn’t. Metal fatigues. Bolts loosen. Concrete cracks. Rebar corrodes inside. Water infiltrates. Tiny stresses accumulate until the moment arrives when the structure can no longer bear what has been quietly gathering. Collapse is often the moment we notice the drift, and we confuse the timing of our awareness with the timing of the process.

Even memory is not exempt. We tell ourselves it is a vault. It is not. It fades, distorts, merges, edits for emotional coherence, discards what it no longer needs. Proper nouns slip away first—the anchors. Then sequence becomes uncertain. The self is not a monument. It is a maintained narrative, and it too is touched by loosening.

Scale this up to institutions and civilizations and the pattern does not change—only the consequences do. Trust thins. Corruption normalizes. Competence is replaced by credentialing. Infrastructure decays invisibly until potholes and blackouts make it visible. Laws multiply until enforcement becomes selective. Elites detach until legitimacy dissolves. Collapse is not always invasion or apocalypse; often it is drift allowed to accumulate until the structure can no longer bear its own strains.

So we arrive at a sentence that can sit like a stone at the bottom of the riverbed: Left alone, it falls apart.

This is not a complaint. It is a description. And once you truly know it—not as information but as a lived law—you stop being shocked by what is normal.

Kohelet and the adulthood of clear sight

In Jewish tradition, the Book of Kohelet—Ecclesiastes—is often linked to King Solomon late in life: an old king looking back, trying to name what was real. Whether one takes the authorship literally or not, the voice is unmistakably late-life: clear-eyed, unseduced by slogans, impatient with easy comforts. Kohelet is not a hymn of optimism, and it is not an invitation to despair. It is a book of reckoning.

Kohelet matters now because we live in an age intoxicated with becoming: innovation, disruption, reinvention, progress as a marketing term. We speak easily about what could be, what should be, what will be. Kohelet stands at the far end of the arc and says: look again. The world does not only become; it also unbecomes. The world does not only build; it also unbuilds. And much of what we call “meaning” is the attempt to live honestly inside that fact.

But Kohelet’s honesty, if we let it mature us rather than sour us, does something paradoxical: it steadies the heart. When you stop demanding that reality behave like a fantasy, you become less brittle. You stop confusing disappointment with truth. You stop mistaking sobriety for bitterness. You begin to see that if coherence is not the default, then every pocket of coherence—every stable good, every held-together human system—is not “the minimum.” It is a marvel.

Which brings us to the question that follows entropy the way dawn follows night:

If the world drifts by default, how does anything ever get built—and held—at all?

The other half of the world

If entropy is the world’s patient drift away from order, coherence, and function, then we have to admit something else just as fundamental: the world is not only a place that falls apart. It is also a place where things are held together. We know this because we have seen it: a garden kept alive in dry heat; a bridge that carries thousands safely day after day because someone returns with a flashlight and a clipboard; a hospital that functions despite its complexity because countless people do their small part with competence; a school that lifts a child because teachers keep showing up; a legal system that restrains violence because enough citizens still consent to the discipline of rules; a family that survives grief because someone apologizes, someone forgives, someone returns.

We live inside two grammars at once: the loosening and the tying. The first grammar explains why gains do not remain merely because they were won. The second grammar explains why the disappointment is not the final truth. Something in reality, and something in us, keeps building.

It is tempting to call that “progress” and end the thought there. But slogans are where clarity goes to die. Better to name the actual forces at work—the agents of building—because only then can we speak realistically about “making progress in the real world.”

Evolution: the world’s slow engineer

Start with coral. A reef looks like architecture, yet it is built without an architect: tiny lives depositing structure upon structure, generation upon generation, making a habitat where none existed before. Or consider the immune system: detection, response, memory, regulation—an entire ecology that learns and adapts to keep the body coherent against invasion. Evolution produces workable forms through endless trial and retention. It does not aim at perfection; it discovers what can survive.

But evolution is also humbling: its improvements are local, contingent, temporary. The environment shifts. A pathogen appears. A climate changes. Entropy audits every form. What was fit yesterday becomes fragile tomorrow. And yet, despite the audit, life builds. Evolution is the first great builder: the world’s slow engineer, constructing islands of function in a sea of drift.

The human mind: evolution with foresight

Then something stranger arrives: a creature who can see itself in time. A human being can look at summer and imagine winter, remember disaster and prepare, run simulations in thought and choose a path before the path is forced. Evolution in nature runs on generations; human imagination runs on afternoons.

And with foresight comes a moral acceleration. Nature selects for survival. Humans can select for values—fairness, compassion, truth, dignity, beauty, restraint. We can decide that what “works” is not enough; it must also be right. That is a gift. It is also a burden, because values compete, and the world does not hand us simple resolutions among them. But this is the second great builder: mind, attempting to guide what nature does slowly toward what ought to be.

Guardianship: the long phase we do not celebrate

In an entropy-governed world, the heroic act is often not invention. It is return.

Return to the bridge with the inspection report. Return to the water system before it fails. Return to the classroom. Return to the marriage conversation you would rather avoid. Return to an institution’s founding purpose when it has drifted into paperwork and self-protection. Guardianship is the anti-entropy vocation: the work that refuses to pretend that a good thing will remain good just because it once was good.

A library is not preserved by the truth of its books. It is preserved by climate control, careful repair, digitization, metadata, funding, and human love for what must be handed forward. Knowledge does not endure because it is important; it endures because someone tends it. We honor founders and innovators and forget the keepers, though in the long run the keepers determine whether anything achieved will last long enough to matter.

Co-creation: making a second nature

Co-creation is the human act of building with reality, not against it: learning the grain of the world and shaping within it. Agriculture is co-creation—working with seasons, soil, water, biology. Law is co-creation—an engineered environment meant to reduce arbitrariness and restrain violence. Cities are co-creation at scale—sanitation, transport, norms, timekeeping—systems that make certain forms of life possible.

Co-creation is how humans transform raw nature into a habitat for more dignity than raw nature tends to grant. It is never perfect because it is made of imperfect material—us. But it is one of the ways “heaven” becomes imaginable at all: because it makes room for humane life where none would reliably exist.

Complexity: power braided to fragility

As we build layers, we gain capability—and fragility. A power grid is a marvel and a web of dependencies. A hospital is an achievement and an intricate choreography. A modern economy is vast capability and cascading vulnerability. Complexity increases function while multiplying failure modes. It makes maintenance harder, feedback slower, incentives easier to misalign, corruption harder to detect.

Complexity is not an argument against building. It is a reminder that building changes the conditions of keeping.

Progress reframed: not a finish line, a discipline

Now we can speak of “progress” without romance and without cynicism.

If we imagine progress as a final state—a world perfected, stabilized, completed—entropy turns it into delusion. Reality is not built for a permanent ribbon-cutting. But if we define progress as a direction—toward conditions in which dignity, safety, truth, health, and belonging become more common, and needless suffering less common—then progress becomes usable. The goal becomes sustained humane order in a world that tends toward disrepair. Not completion. Durability.

This changes the emotional posture. It replaces the young fantasy of a straight road with an older, truer image: the garden. A garden does not shame itself because weeds return. It does not call itself futile because the work repeats. It understands the terms of the world: growth and decay are braided, and beauty is not in the fantasy of completion but in the faithfulness of return.

So what does making progress in the real world actually look like?

It looks like building sustainable layers under drift.

It looks like accepting the cycle reality imposes: build → stabilize → maintain → renew → replace → build again. Not a pessimistic cycle. A mature one. A society that worships innovation alone becomes brilliant and brittle. A society that worships guardianship alone becomes stable and stagnant. A society that refuses replacement becomes rigid and eventually breaks. Sustainable progress requires three roles in balance: innovators, guardians, and renewers.

And it looks like taking resistance to change seriously—not merely as stubbornness, but as caution, sometimes as the system’s immune response. People resist because change can break things, and they do not want to become collateral damage in someone else’s experiment. A reality-aware pathway lowers resistance not by crushing it, but by meeting it with legibility, phased adoption, reversibility, proof by demonstration, and respect for identity—change without humiliation. The social fabric is itself a layer of humane order; if you tear it while trying to improve the world, you may lose the very medium through which improvement must travel.

Finally, it looks like designing goodness for ordinary humans. Because entropy is constant and humans are mixed, sustained goodness must be engineered to survive ordinary failure: fail safely, detect drift early, learn quickly, repair without panic, and not require saintly people to operate. If goodness depends on perfect people, it will not last. A heaven on earth—if we insist on the phrase—must be built for the kind of humans we are, not the kind we sometimes pretend we are.

Hope without illusions

There is a point in life—Kohelet knew it—when naïveté breaks. You have watched bridges corrode because corrosion is faithful. You have watched institutions drift because habits accrete and purpose thins. You have watched families fracture over small injuries left untended. You have watched memory loosen its grip. You have watched decency flare in one generation and dim in the next. And for a time you may call disappointment “wisdom,” mistaking clarity for bitterness.

But there is a third posture: not naïve optimism, not despair, but realism with steadiness.

It begins when you accept the world’s laws without arguing with them. When you stop demanding that reality behave like a fantasy. When you name entropy as the background condition and stop being scandalized by the unraveling of order, as if decline must always have a villain. Entropy does not need an enemy. It only needs time.

Then something unexpected happens: your heart becomes steadier.

Because if the world drifts by default, then every stable good—every held bridge, every functioning hospital, every school that still lifts children, every institution that remembers its purpose, every marriage repaired rather than abandoned—is not proof that the world is naturally kind. It is proof that there are builders in it.

This is the real shape of progress: not a victory parade, but a series of repairs that hold. Not a straight line, but a rising circle—each rebuilding starting from a slightly higher ledge, each recovery carrying forward a hard-won lesson, each generation inheriting not only problems but tools, not only wounds but remedies, not only drift but the knowledge of drift.

So the dream survives—but it changes shape.

Progress in the real world is not the abolition of drift. It is the creation of durable layers of humane order that can withstand drift. It is not a destination. It is a discipline. It is the persistent human act of returning: to mend what frays, to restore what corrodes, to renew what drifts, to replace what can no longer be repaired, and to build again—without illusions, without despair.

In a universe where entropy never sleeps, the most sacred human work may not be to finish the world, but to keep it livable—again and again—until our days are done.