Addicted to growth

At my first job I remember hearing the word growth in regards to everything. We need to grow this territory, this team, these revenue lines. Yes, I agree that if a business isn't growing it's dying.

But I also wonder if stable businesses need to take growth as seriously as they do. Where I was working was a very reputable business, has been around for 60 years, the family is now billionares, ect. If you are a billionaire I think it is safe to say that you can take a pause from expediential growth and celebrate. However the atmopshere felt as though we were on a sinking ship and had to clog every leaking hole with wads of cash and sales goals.

If billionares are this fixaed on growth, imagine what the millionaires who want to be billionares are doing, and the thousand-aires who want to be millionares. Then image a small mom and pop bakery that simply makes bread and croissants in the morning and prays that people show up. I don’t think they've ever thought about growing their business and they seem to be doing just fine…

That is why we are consuming the world today. We are addicted to growth. If an onion was addicted to growth and didn't stop, it would eventually blow up to be the size of earth. An onion knows when to stop growing. We don’t, and that is why we are loosing our planet. This growth is eventually going to bring is an ecological disaster considering that nearly every countrys GDP depends on extracting something from the earth.

If I help this company grow, I am contributing to emissions of hundereds of flights shitting on the earth. If I help a real estate development company grow I am contributing to the destruction of entire habitats. If I help some consumer goods company grow, chemicals are getting poured out somewhere.

People are quick to act as if their company needs growth as if it were about to die, but nobody is quick to act as if their earth needs support as if it were about to die.

What happened to value in scarcity? If your product is that good and people want it, they should have to fight for it. Instead we shove these products in everyone's face and its convenient so they give in.

Take Walmart for example. Walmart is addicted to growth and will continue to cut down acres of land to slap a massive parking lot and store front in place of a habitat. They want to be everywhere at every time so that you buy their products. If Walmart truly held value and closed 99% of it's stores, would people be going out of their way to shop there? Probably not because there is not much value. It is cheap products that will serve as a temporary solution. And that's why they can't let this happen, if things were limited and people actually got to choose where they got their stuff they would not be running to Walmart. They only run to Walmart because Walmart ran into them with massiveness. 

If growing is all we care about there will be no time to stop and admire the growth that has been achieved. Nobody has at the end of Q2 ever said "wow…we did great. Why don't we all take time to recharge". They say "Q2 was great now lets move on to our plan for Q3".

Growth is what we are fixed on because I think most people would not know what to do with themselves if they were just given free time to their own devices. If your company randomly gave you 3 weeks off, yes you'd be happy, but I for some reason can just imagine everyone actually getting bored. Not knowing what to do. Maybe they would do something for personal growth like get a yoga teaching certification or take an online course. Personal growth is great, but the addiction of growth still stands.

If we took a pause from growing and a moment for accepting, I think we'd have a much better understanding of the reality that we've created for ourselves. I don’t think we have any understanding of what we've done, it's impacts, and how to best direct ourselves since there is no time for reflection.