What is “growth” and why are we obsessed with it?

The truth is, I don’t think we really know. Growth is something that shows up in bar graphs and pie charts and gets presented to employees in thousands, maybe millions of offices every day; growth is a mystery force. A god that we worship.

But why is it — this unknown variable; this aspiration — important? Why is it our God?

On the subway, it’s hard not to look around and think that everyone is being driven onto the train each morning by the phantom of growth; the obsession with it.

Flowers grow, but so does cancer. Human populations grow, but so does the population of a dangerous virus. Growth has no value in itself — the value has to be posited.

In Western society, in liberal society, we tend to think of growth as equivalent to progress: if the pie chart keeps getting bigger, than the mysterious God of Growth must be present, and the Good must be increasing. I find this comical. I don’t think employees of big companies, companies that keep growing, for instance, get any happier or wiser, I think they just get bigger bonuses (the origins of which are often morally confusing).

The idea of time as an arrow, of civilization as a bar graph which rises each year, is a myth — in the sense that provides structure to and explanation for, our civilization. America is the land of the Growth Mindset. Increasing growth is the new manifest destiny. Now that we do not expand over land, we expand numerically (we make the numbers go up whatever the numbers are).

What I long for is cyclical time; a way of life decoupled from the relentless obsession with getting bigger.

Quality life, not quantity of life.

Photo by Yomex Owo on Unsplash