We Can’t Grow Forever
There’s a reality that nobody, especially economists and government officials, like to admit because it leads down a dangerous path of anarchy in a vast financial and economic order that depends on the very antithesis: we can’t grow forever. At some point, we will exhaust our natural resources faster than we can figure out how to squeeze more out of them. Our soil productivity will be maxed out, our freshwater supplies will run dry and yet, in the face of an obvious equation with finite inputs that all point to this eventuality, we continue to grow and grow and reproduce at incredible, exponential rates. Like a virus without a care in the world, outgrowing its delicate host day by day.
While we can sit all day and debate on how we will develop new technologies that will milk every last cent of every last resource and make 1+1=3, the reality that faces me is one that is leaning much more towards 1+1=2. Food production efficiency is slowly keeling over. Water supplies are dwindling despite all the reclamation and desalination efforts around the world. Our basic necessities are facing an onslaught of a population crisis about to explode. We just refuse to believe it yet. The reality is that the vast majority of the productivity gains have been in non-essential goods. Technology that gives us smarter and smarter phones. Ultra-light computers. Faster processors. Apps that take hundreds of headaches out of our lives. But none of these things can do anything about the physical nutrient content available to deplete in the soil. None of these things can quench our throats fast enough when the rivers run dry. It’s scary. For everything we have built in the last 50 years, it’s amazing how constrained food and water still is.
I have a controversial theory (if you can even call it that without being insulting) about this scenario unfolding before us. And it is that we are psychologically and behaviorally coded to subconsciously self-correct for this. As societies get to a point where our basic needs are so amply provided for, where our lowest standards of living in the developed world are so far ahead of what we truly need at the end of the day, we begin to lose the desire to nurture a posterity and take advantage of the excess to be selfish. We lose the desire to marry, to have kids. We’d rather travel the world, pursue our passions and arts and hobbies. Screw marriage, screw tradition, live life! We see signs of this all over the world. In Japan, in Russia, where governments have spent millions to encourage their younger adults to have children. In the US, where shunning marriage is increasingly being seen as an act of courage, of freedom and independence, in stark contrast to the taboo it once was only a few years ago. Relationships have become swipes. Long-term relationships are now seen as the curiosities, not the norm. What if this is all a coded behavior to cool down our population growth to better moderate our resource consumption? To moderate our sheer number to ensure a sustainable balance between resources available and resources consumed? What if this is all by design that so many of us choose to be childless and take some stock out of the world so that the ones who remain can breathe, eat and drink more plentifully into the future without the threat of starvation and thirst?
It’s controversial. It’s a bit zany and dystopian. It’s probably just batsh*t crazy at the end of the day. But it’s an interesting thought experiment, inspired by the following line from one of the most radical films and thought experiments of our time:
For all the thoughts, dreams, visions of billions of men and women; for all the thousands and millions of years of incredible intellectual flourishment, could we truly be reduced to something so simple? So elemental? A virus?
