The Paradox of Progress - Why Success Makes Us Forget
Welcome to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. Today we're diving into one of the most maddening quirks of human psychology, a paradox that explains everything from why measles is making a comeback to why we keep repeating the same economic mistakes. It's called the paradox of progress, and here's how it works: The better we get at solving a problem, the more we forget the problem ever existed in the first place. This is not about nostalgia or wanting to return to the good old days.
Leslie Poston:This is about a specific psychological blind spot that causes societies and individuals to systematically dismantle the very things that made their success possible. We'll explore how this shows up in public health, civil rights, economic, climate policy, and even our personal lives. And more importantly, we'll talk about whether there's anything we can do to outsmart our own forgetting. Because here's the thing: this pattern is so predictable, so universal, that once you start seeing it, you'll recognize it everywhere. So let's start with a story that's probably playing out in your community right now, whether you realize it or not.
Leslie Poston:If you're 40, you might not remember measles as a serious threat. And that's exactly the problem. Measles was declared eliminated in The United States in the year February. Eliminated. Gone.
Leslie Poston:Wiped out by one of the most successful public health campaigns in human history. But here we are in 2025, dealing with outbreaks that would have been unthinkable just two decades ago. What happened? The answer isn't just misinformation or social media echo chambers, though those play a role. The deeper issue is that success created an illusion of safety.
Leslie Poston:When parents today consider vaccination, they're not weighing the risk of vaccines against the memory of children dying from measles encephalitis or being left deaf or brain damaged. They're weighing vaccine risk against nothing because in their lived experience, measles doesn't exist. This connects to research on how our risk perception changes when we anticipate good news. During the early part of the COVID-nineteen pandemic, researchers found that as soon as people heard vaccines were on the horizon, many started abandoning safety measures like masking or social distancing, not because they were already vaccinated, the vaccines weren't out, but because the mere prospect of protection made the current risk feel less real. It's the same psychological mechanism in both cases.
Leslie Poston:When the threat becomes invisible, whether through successful vaccination programs or the promise of future vaccines, our brains treat it as if it never existed. This happens because our amygdala, the brain's alarm system, is designed to respond to immediate and present dangers. So when a threat disappears from our environment, the amygdala stops firing those warning signals, and without that emotional arousal, the prefrontal cortex doesn't prioritize story or retreatment memories about why the threat mattered in the first place. We're just not wired to maintain vigilance against dangers we can't see, even when that invisibility is the direct result of our vigilance working. This is the paradox of progress in its purest form: The better we get at preventing something bad, the less real that bad thing feels, which makes us less motivated to keep preventing it.
Leslie Poston:Now, let's look at how this plays out in social progress. We've made measurable advances in civil rights over the past century. Voting rights, workplace protections, marriage equality, disability rights. These weren't abstract policy changes. They represented the end of real documented suffering for millions of people, or close to the end.
Leslie Poston:And yet, we're watching many of these gains erode in real time. Voting rights protections that stood for decades are being rolled back. Affirmative action programs are being dismantled. LGBTQ plus protections are under constant legal challenge. The persuasion rhetoric for these changes is often, oh, we've made enough progress, or These protections aren't needed anymore.
Leslie Poston:Part of what's happening to make this regression palatable to voters is psychological distance. Neuroscientists have found that our brains process distant events, whether distant in time, space, or personal experience using the same neural pathways we use for abstract thinking. This means historical injustices literally feel less real to us than immediate experiences, even when the consequences of those injustices are still shaping the present. Basically, our brains have a hard time treating recent history as recent if we didn't personally experience it. The Civil Rights Act was 1964.
Leslie Poston:The Americans with Disabilities Act was 1990. Marriage equality was 2015. In historical terms, those are yesterday. But in psychological terms, they feel ancient to people who didn't live through the struggle. There's also the phenomenon that sociologists call colorblind racism, the belief that if we stop acknowledging inequality, it will somehow magically disappear.
Leslie Poston:But this goes deeper than willful denial. It's about how our minds process progress itself. When overt discrimination decreases, we tend to assume the underlying problem is solved, not just managed. Success in civil rights creates an illusion of finality. We tell ourselves the work is done.
Leslie Poston:The battle is won and the problem is solved, but rights aren't like vaccinations. They don't provide permanent immunity. Rights require constant maintenance, constant reinforcement, and constant remembering of why they were necessary in the first place. When that memory fades, old problems don't just return they often come back in more sophisticated forms, dressed up as progress themselves. Let's talk money.
Leslie Poston:After the two thousand and eight financial crisis nearly broke the global economy, governments and banks implemented strict new regulations. Dog Frank in The U. S, Basel III internationally, stress tests for banks, restrictions on risky trading. For a while, measures worked. The financial system stabilized and the crisis was averted.
Leslie Poston:But then came the inevitable pushbackclaims that regulations were stifling innovation, preventing growth, or were unnecessary bureaucracy. Gradually, many protections were stripped away. By 2018, key parts of Dodd Frank had been rolled back, including stress testing requirements for mid sized banks. Fast forward to 2023, Silicon Valley Bank collapses in a matter of days, followed by Credit Suisse, creating exactly the kind of systemic risk the post 02/2008 regulations had been designed to prevent. The bank runs, the panic, the government bailouts.
Leslie Poston:It was like watching a slow motion replay of mistakes we thought we'd learned from. This is economic amnesia in action. We have this pattern that repeats with almost mechanical precision. Crisis leads to regulation. Regulation leads to stability.
Leslie Poston:Stability leads to complacency. Complacency leads to deregulation, and deregulation leads us once again back to crisis. Research shows that people tend to dismiss incremental progress as insufficient, always demanding sweeping changes that often discard the safeguards that we're working. It's not that gradual improvement is boring, although it can be. It's that our brains are literally wired to seek dramatic solutions, especially when the original problem no longer feels urgent.
Leslie Poston:We also have a tendency to create simplified success stories after the fact. The 2010s economic recovery often gets attributed to innovation or entrepreneurship and not to the regulatory framework that prevented another financial meltdown. Those boring, invisible safeguards get written out of the narrative entirely. This reflects what psychologists call the generation effect. We remember information better when we actively generate it ourselves rather than when it's given to us.
Leslie Poston:Success stories that emphasize individual agency feel more memorable and true to our brains than complex explanations involving multiple systems, even when the complex explanations are accurate. So why do we forget what worked? It starts with overconfidence in our own memory. Research consistently shows that people overestimate their ability to remember important information, especially when that information feels meaningful or significant. We think, Of course, I'll remember why this policy exists, but then we don't.
Leslie Poston:There's also something called the forgetting curve, a measurable decline in memory retention over time. Without regular reinforcement, most of what we learn fades rapidly. And here's the key: information that isn't tied to strong emotional experiences fades even faster. The hippocampus, which consolidates memories for long term storage, prioritizes information that's emotionally significant or frequently rehearsed. Policy successes rarely trigger strong emotions, and we don't rehearse the details of how they work, so they fade from collective memory much faster than the problems they solved.
Leslie Poston:Reading about banking regulations doesn't create the same memorable imprint as living through a bank run. And then there's cognitive ease. When a system is working smoothly, we assume it requires no maintenance. That's like assuming your car never needs oil changes because the engine runs fine until it doesn't. Success creates a blind spot where we see the results but forget the ongoing effort required to maintain them.
Leslie Poston:This is compounded by what psychologists call the illusion of knowledge. When systems work well, they become invisible to us. We stop noticing the infrastructure that makes our lives possible: The food safety inspections, the building codes, the air traffic control systems, the financial regulations fade into the background of our awareness, which makes them feel less important than they actually are. This invisibility problem is compounded by what neuroscientists call habituation. When our brains encounter the same stimulus repeatedly, they literally stop responding to it.
Leslie Poston:The neural pathways that once fired in response to clean air or safe drinking water eventually go quiet, making these benefits psychologically invisible even as they remain physically essential. Here's another piece of the puzzle: We're natural storytellers, and we like our stories clean and simple. Research shows that people consistently create oversimplified narratives about how success was achieved, emphasizing individual traits while downplaying systems and structures. The entrepreneur who made it through hard work never mind the small business administration loans, the university research that created their technology, or the legal framework that protected their intellectual property, or the city that turned itself around to strong leadership, never mind the federal investment, the demographic changes, or the broader economic trends. These tidy success stories are psychologically satisfying, but they're dangerous because they shift our focus away from the actual mechanisms that create success.
Leslie Poston:When we attribute progress to individual characteristics rather than systemic factors, we start to believe that maintaining those systems is unnecessary. This shows up constantly in public policy. People vote against social safety nets because they believe success stories about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, not recognizing how much those stories depend on the very programs they're voting to eliminate. Media reinforces this through what researchers call the fundamental attribution error. We attribute success to personal qualities and failure to circumstances, when the reality is usually much more complex.
Leslie Poston:Hollywood loves stories about individual heroes overcoming the system, not stories about well designed systems that prevent problems from occurring in the first place. This preference for simple narratives reflects how our brains evolve to process information. The default mode network, active when we're not focused on the outside world, naturally seeks patterns and creates coherent stories from fragmented information. Complex systemic explanations require more cognitive effort than our brains want to spend. Personality traits play a role here too, particularly narcissism.
Leslie Poston:Research shows that people with grandiose narcissistic traits are more likely to ignore expert advice, make impulsive decisions, and believe they know better than collective wisdom or historical precedent. Sound familiar? We've seen this in corporate leadership, where successful companies bring in disruptors who gut established safety protocols or quality controls in the name of innovation. We've seen it in politics, where leaders dismiss scientists, historians, and career civil servants as the swamp or the establishment. This isn't just egoalthough ego is part of it.
Leslie Poston:Narcissistic traits actively correlate with overconfidence, reduced openness to feedback, and increased risk taking, especially after experiencing a success. The very success that should teach humility instead breeds arrogance. In organizations, this manifests as institutional memory loss. Companies grow rapidly and then replace experienced back with newcomers who don't understand why certain systems exist. The knowledge about what works and why it works gets lost in layoffs, reorganizations, and cultural shifts.
Leslie Poston:This connects to the Dunning Kruger effect: people with less competence often feel most confident about discarding historical best practices. They don't know enough to know that they don't know, so they assume existing systems are just bureaucratic bloat rather than accumulated wisdom. Brain imaging studies show that overconfident individuals have reduced activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the region responsible for monitoring conflicts and errors. This means they're literally less likely to notice when their decisions contradict established knowledge or when their assumptions might be wrong. Climate change might be the ultimate test case for the paradox of progress.
Leslie Poston:Every success in environmental protection creates its own backlash. Cities that implement clean air policies suddenly face questions about whether such strict rules are still needed. Regions that invest in renewable energy see voters rolling back these investments to save money, forgetting why they were implemented. This connects to research on risk perception and temporal distance. People struggle to take action against threats that are slow moving, abstract, or distant in time.
Leslie Poston:Climate change checks all three boxes. And the more successful we are at mitigating its effects, the more invisible the threat becomes. And when the air is clean and the storms aren't catastrophic this year, people tune out. It's a visibility problem. Success becomes the new baseline, rather than evidence of what could happen without continued effort.
Leslie Poston:We forget that environmental protection is like taking medicine for a chronic condition. You feel fine while you're taking it, but that does not mean you're cured. The psychological challenge is that environmental success looks like nothing happening. No oil spills, no smog alerts, no species extinction. Happening is boring to the human brain, and boredom doesn't motivate continued vigilance.
Leslie Poston:Here's where things get really twisted. Even when objective measures show improvement, people often believe things are getting worse. This is due to negativity bias, our built in tendency to focus more on negative information than positive information. Crime statistics can be down, but people feel less safe. Educational outcomes can be improving, but everyone still thinks schools are failing.
Leslie Poston:Economic inequality can be decreasing in some measures, but the perception is that it's getting worse. This matters because when people perceive decline, they seek dramatic changes, even when those changes might undo actual progress. They elect reactionary leaders. They cut essential programs. They abandon functioning systems in favor of something that promises to be completely different.
Leslie Poston:Social media amplifies this through what we are now calling doomscrolling, the compulsive consumption of negative news and information. The availability bias means we assume things are getting worse because negative news is more readily available to us than positive trends, which tend to be gradual and less newsworthy. This creates a feedback loop where people forget about progress, focusing on problems, and then make decisions that actually create the decline they were worried about in the first place. So what can we do about this? The paradox of progress might be hardwired into human psychology, but that doesn't mean we're helpless against it.
Leslie Poston:First, education and public memory matter enormously. Countries that do a good job of maintaining collective memory about why certain systems exist tend to be more successful at preserving them. Germany is often cited as an example. They've made remembering the consequences of forgetting a civic duty, especially around the rise of fascism. We can also build maintenance into our systems from the beginning.
Leslie Poston:What if every new policy or program included a built in review process, not to change it, but to remind people why it was created? Regular retrospectives, anniversary commemorations, impact assessments that focus on what would happen without the intervention. Behavioral psychology offers tools as well. Spaced repetition, habit stacking, environmental cues. We know these work for individual learning and they can work for collective memory as well.
Leslie Poston:On a personal level, this means being intentional about remembering your own successes, journaling about what worked and why, taking photos or keeping records of progress, setting calendar reminders that say, Remember why you started this? Rather than just do this thing. Because the paradox of progress isn't just societal, it's also deeply personal. We forget why our diets worked, why our therapy helped, or why we left that toxic job or ended that harmful relationship. And in forgetting, we often slide backward into the same patterns we worked so hard to escape.
Leslie Poston:The paradox of progress is this: when things go right, we forget what made them go right. And once we forget, we open the door to repeat the very mistakes we thought we'd left behind. Whether we're talking about vaccines or civil rights, financial regulations or environmental protection, personal growth or societal change, forgetting what worked is a universal human challenge. It's also one we can outsmart if we're willing to be more intentional about how we remember success. The key insight is that progress doesn't maintain itself.
Leslie Poston:It must be remembered, reinforced, and actively protected. The systems that keep us safe, healthy, and free require not just our gratitude, but our ongoing attention. So here's a little homework. Think about something in your life that's working well, so well that you've stopped thinking about it. Your health, your relationships, maybe your career, your community.
Leslie Poston:And now ask yourself, what would happen if you stopped doing the little things that make that work? And what can you do to remember why those little things matter? Thanks for listening to this episode of PsyberSpace. This is your host, Leslie Poston, signing off. As always, until next time, stay curious and subscribe so you never miss an episode.
Leslie Poston:And a little reminder, if you're listening to this in May 2025, there are still a few days to vote for us for our nomination for best women in podcasting science podcast edition. There's going to be a link in the show notes. See you next week.
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