Unpopular Opinion: The concept of "progress" is itself a backward-looking teleological fiction that prevents us from seeing what we're actually doing wrong.

Look at any major technological advancement and you'll find it solves one problem while generating three new ones, yet we call this progress as if the net balance is positive. We can't measure "net" because our reference point keeps shifting to accommodate whatever outcome happens next. The entire narrative of human improvement relies on a tautology: what works for us at the moment must be better than what worked before it.