Growth

Published on October 20, 2024, filed under Everything Else (RSS feed for all categories).

Growth is healthy to a point. If it wasn’t, you could measure 18 meters by now and had other problems.

Growth that goes beyond any point usually has a name. It’s “cancer.”

On this planet, however, growth is a big thing. It’s the reason we have businesses, and on this planet, there are many of them.

It’s not surprising that growth as a goal, without limitations, is a problem.

Nothing in a finite system can grow forever.

Even in an infinite system, nothing could probably outgrow its surroundings.

But we don’t care. Some people, more people every day, can’t get their pockets full enough, feel they need to jump on the death bandwagon to squander as many living and dead resources as possible.

Growth is killing us.

Our children have long started to yell at us about this, and we laugh at and jail them.

We do that rather than acknowledge they’re right and take affirmative action against the many, many, many, many, many growth-related issues.

We do that because we have a full-blown leadership crisis on top that. Trump. The far-right. Nazis as we call them elsewhere. Musk. Tech bros. Influencers. Conspiracy theorists. Men. LMAO. WTF.

Nobody is acting, and as AI is wasting even more resources to then inundate our information spaces, nobody is listening, either.

That we’re so f’ed isn’t doomsaying, it’s a statement of fact.

What we need is not growth—it’s sustainability.

Sustainability is literally what we need to survive.

(At our stage of development, sustainable growth is BS. A smoke bomb. From everything we know, we, mankind, cannot be trusted with any growth.)

Sustainability would finally mean taking some responsibility for a for all practical purposes finite planet with finite resources with finite species with finite living beings.

Make other choices, people. Make other choices, you. Decide against growth anywhere except in your head. Start choosing sustainability for everything outside of your head. Start demanding better leadership—because in many places, that sucks most of all, starting with the choices to vote for. (I mean, LOL. Imagine—and savor the irony—we set the hiring bar as low in our businesses as we do for our countries.)

Godspeed, on this joyride.

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a frontend engineering leader and tech author/publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead for companies like Google and as an engineering manager for companies like Miro, I’m a contributor to several web standards, and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development (and engineering management), but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and views. (Be critical, interpret charitably, and give feedback.)