Growth is a Poor Man's God

We've built an entire civilization around a single metric: growth. 

GDP must grow. Startups must grow. Your follower count, your revenue, your personal brand, your meditation practice. The theology is unified and cross-functional: more is better, stasis is death, and if you're not expanding you're contracting. 

Politicians promise growth. VCs fund growth. Self-help gurus sell growth. Everyone agrees growth is good. 

So long as the trajectory of the Line points up and to the right, we feel a warm sensation of moral correctness. If it flattens, we diagnose a spiritual malaise. 

We replaced God with Year-Over-Year returns. 

They offer better feedback loops. 

It’s a theology of the tangible.

We immolate our leisure and mental bandwidth to appease the volatile deity of Compound Interest. The logic is that suffering today buys utopia tomorrow. It appeals to the "poor man" in a very real sense. A rich spirit can dwell in stasis without panic, but a poor spirit needs constant external validation that things are improving. 

Growth fills the hole left by the death of intrinsic purpose. It provides a default answer to "what should I do today?" which is simply "more than I did yesterday." It’s a low-barrier-to-entry faith; you don't need to study texts, you just need to hustle.

But infinite growth on a finite planet is obviously incoherent. Infinite growth of a company eventually hits market saturation. Infinite personal optimization bumps against the hard limit of human mortality. We know this. Yet the worship continues because growth serves a psychological function that sustainability never could: it provides direction without requiring you to decide on a destination.

At some point you have enough, and the game becomes preservation, not accumulation. Growth is what you chase when you can't yet afford to stop running.

The worship of "more" is the path of least resistance for a civilization that has forgotten how to sit still.