I am writing this from a place of rare stillness, a spiritual retreat in Kenya, where the noise of modern life feels both far away and, paradoxically, crystal clear. Sitting with my notebook, I found myself questioning a belief that almost everyone around me seems to share without examination: that the world is getting worse. The daily news confirms it, dinner table conversations rehearse it, and the mission statements of countless organisations appear to have already settled it as fact. But what if that collective agreement is itself the problem? What if the world is not deteriorating at all, but evolving, and what if our resistance to that evolution is doing more damage than the change we are so afraid of?
The Story We Keep Telling Ourselves
It has become almost fashionable to declare that the world is in crisis. There is more negativity, more crime, more moral decay, more vulgarity, we say. Social media amplifies every act of cruelty and hands it to us before breakfast. Conversations spiral into lament. And in response, thousands of think tanks, NGOs, advisory bodies, and movements have been formed, all dedicated to diagnosing what has gone wrong and prescribing what must be restored.
I understand the impulse. When something feels wrong, the human mind wants to name it, contain it, and correct it. But somewhere between the diagnosis and the prescription, a quiet assumption slips in that almost nobody questions: that there is a correct version of the world, that we once had it, and that we have now deviated dangerously from it.
That assumption deserves far more scrutiny than it receives.
What If the World Is Not the Problem?
Sitting in the Kenyan stillness, I wrote a question I had never quite articulated before: what if there is no problem as such?
What if the world is not in doom at all, but simply undergoing evolution? And what if we, the ones clamouring most loudly about how broken everything is, are actually the ones standing in the way?
This is not a comfortable question. It implicates all of us, including the well-intentioned.
In psychology, there is a well-documented phenomenon called the “end of history illusion.” Research published in Science by Quoidbach and colleagues found that while people readily acknowledge how much they have changed in the past, they consistently underestimate how much they will continue to change in the future. We believe, in essence, that our current self is the finished version. We do the same with the world. We assume that the values, structures, and social norms we grew up with represent the correct arrangement of human civilisation. Anything that departs from that arrangement gets quietly labelled as decay.
But history, looked at honestly, does not support that conclusion.
Evolution Has Always Looked Like Collapse From the Inside
Every major shift in human civilisation has appeared, from the inside, like the end of something sacred. When democracy displaced monarchy, traditionalists mourned the death of order. When women entered professional life in numbers, many declared the family unit finished. When digital communication disrupted print, established voices warned of the death of serious thought.
From inside any transition, the new always looks like degeneration. This is partly neurological. The amygdala, the brain’s threat-detection centre, treats unfamiliarity as danger. What is novel registers as risk, not possibility. So when cultural values shift, when gender norms evolve, when spiritual frameworks diversify, when generational attitudes diverge from those of their parents, the nervous system of the previous generation can respond as if under attack.
We confuse the discomfort of change with evidence of decline. They are not the same thing.
Every evolution challenges the previous beliefs, practices, and values. That is not a flaw in the process. That is the process.
The Ego Hidden Inside “Saving the World”
Here is where I want to say something that may be uncomfortable to read, but which I believe deserves to be said plainly.
Many of the organisations, think tanks, and movements formed to “cure” the world may be doing so, in part, from a place of ego. Not malice. Not dishonesty. Ego.
When we cannot accept what is, when we insist that the world must conform to our image of what it should look like, we are not always acting from wisdom. We are sometimes acting from attachment. And attachment to a fixed image of how humans, societies, and civilisations ought to behave is, in classical yogic understanding, a form of suffering known as abhinivesha, the deep-seated resistance to change, loss, and the unknown.
This is not to dismiss the extraordinary and necessary work done by organisations addressing human rights, mental health, poverty, and justice. That work matters enormously. But there is a meaningful difference between addressing genuine harm and insisting that the world conform to one particular cultural or ideological template.
One is service. The other is control dressed up as concern.
Acceptance Is Not the Same as Surrender
I want to be precise about what I am not saying.
I am not suggesting that we accept rape, murder, kidnapping, betrayal, or any form of deliberate cruelty. Harm is harm. There is no evolutionary framing that justifies it, and none is being offered here.
What I am suggesting is that we stop conflating harm with difference, and stop treating change as automatic collapse. In mindfulness-based psychology, a crucial distinction is drawn between acceptance and agreement. Acceptance means seeing what is, clearly and without distortion. Agreement means endorsing it. We can accept the reality of how the world is evolving without approving of every manifestation of that evolution, and we can engage meaningfully with what troubles us without declaring war on change itself.
The concept of radical acceptance, developed within dialectical behaviour therapy by Marsha Linehan, is grounded in this insight: that reality, acknowledged as it is rather than as we wish it were, is the only true starting point for intelligent action. When we spend our energy fighting the very fact of change, we lose the capacity to navigate that change with grace.
A Reflection Worth Taking Home
A woman I once worked with described her relationship with her adult children as a constant battle. She felt they had abandoned everything she had taught them: respect, tradition, restraint. She arrived at coaching convinced they needed to change.
What emerged over several sessions was something far more honest: she was grieving. Not because her children had failed, but because the world they were inhabiting no longer matched the one she had imagined for them. Her pain was real. But its source was not their choices. It was her attachment to a future that had not arrived.
When she began to release that attachment, she stopped seeing her children as lost and started seeing them as themselves. The relationship transformed.
This is what evolving with the world looks like at a personal level. It looks like curiosity replacing condemnation. It looks like asking “what is this showing me?” rather than “what has gone wrong?” It looks like accepting, genuinely and not just intellectually, that humanity goes through evolution, and that human behaviour, mindset, and social dynamics are not supposed to look the same as they did fifty years ago.
The Question I Left Kenya With
Here, from the quiet of this Kenyan retreat, I offer the question I have been sitting with.
What if the world does not need saving? What if it needs witnessing, with honesty, with humility, and without the compulsion to reduce it to a problem requiring our solution?
What if the most courageous and genuinely useful act, in a world that feels overwhelming, is to do the internal work first? To evolve yourself before deciding that the world needs to be fixed?
The world has always been in motion. It always will be. The question is whether you have the psychological flexibility, and the spiritual maturity, to move with it.
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