Growth, Glorious Growth

Growth at last - thanks goodness - for only growth can save us now! At last, we can all get richer. You can buy the better mobile phone you’ve been thinking about - with a better camera. Then you can sit on your sofa watching more AI-generated videos. With more money, you can add more things to your day – more hobbies, more clubs for the kids, more PTA fundraisers to buy more stuff for the school. More parties – more party bags – maybe bigger party bags with more stuff in them – better stuff. More cupboards to put the stuff in. A pet – even a puppy, and a bed for the puppy and a puppy massager and enrolment at puppy school and after-school club for the puppy.

Maybe with more growth there’ll be more jobs – more work – just what we voted for. You could get another job or a better job where you can work more for more money. You could even work making money, in finance or in marketing. You could get a bigger house. More houses. More houses for more people. Bigger cities; more people squashed together where they can’t fend for themselves and rely only on tens of thousands of lorries driving in ‘stuff’ – and with more growth – more ‘stuff.' More deliveries for the people who are too busy to collect things themselves because they’re doing marketing and finance, or nannying for the kids of the people doing marketing and finance, or wiping the bottoms of people whose families are too busy to wipe their bottoms because they’re doing marketing or finance, or driving lorries full of plastic toys for the party bags of the kids of people who are doing marketing or finance.

And it's OK – because the poor people will get richer too – a rising tide lifts all boats. Soon, everybody will be able to have a better phone and buy more plastic toys for their kids and partake in entertainment – like bowling and escape rooms all weekend, every weekend, and buy ice creams from ice-cream stalls and buy pretty decorations to hang in their houses and trinkets and trophies and have expensive haircuts and get new teeth – maybe even new boobs – why not!

The average human uses 11,000 watts of energy per day – but with growth we can increase that. Soon 12,000 watts, then 13,000. If growth keeps going, we might double it. We can grow the number of tonnes of waste we drop into the sea and bury under the ground. We can turn jungles into recycling plants as far as the eye can see to recycle plastic toys from party bags into more plastic toys for bigger, better party bags and more machines to do things we don’t have time to do and of course all kinds of kitsch decorations to put on wedding tables in the name of love.

For there can be no love without growth! No wonder we all voted for it – one need only to whistle through the consequences to see what a delectable future it offers!