The endless-growth mindset will eventually be viewed as a mental illness. We pity hoarders, but we somehow look up to the unreasonably wealthy, even though they are eerily similar in their attitude and behaviour towards "their precious".
If you look at a graph of human population over the last 1000 years [1] (and since -10000AD if you want [2]), it looks eerily like a stock market chart that has temporarily spiked before crashing back down to a more reasonable valuation.
Over the ages, we've had many population declines [3] but they've tended to be smaller and smaller (relatively to the total population). Is there a massive "correction" coming, as challenges of carrying capacity, climate change, global conflict and disease rear their ugly heads? Hard to say.
Regardless - I object to using the word "progress" as a stand-in for "more". It hardly ever is.
If you look at a graph of human population over the last 1000 years [1] (and since -10000AD if you want [2]), it looks eerily like a stock market chart that has temporarily spiked before crashing back down to a more reasonable valuation.
Over the ages, we've had many population declines [3] but they've tended to be smaller and smaller (relatively to the total population). Is there a massive "correction" coming, as challenges of carrying capacity, climate change, global conflict and disease rear their ugly heads? Hard to say.
Regardless - I object to using the word "progress" as a stand-in for "more". It hardly ever is.
1: https://i.imgur.com/iSNbGTN.png
2: https://i.imgur.com/73zV927.png
3: https://i.imgur.com/sccJBGB.png
(these are hastily back-of-the-napkin'd with GPT, so take with a grain of salt)