Limited growth - The future economic system

[kalle123]

Watching some seminars about how to solve the problem with our dependense on growth, interest and limited resources.

Do you have any ideas?

How do we redefine growth? Can we avoid increased criminality and starvation?

I think some keys are happiness, spirituality and meditation.
Entheogens could speed up the process..

 

[Mac1958]

Watching some seminars about how to solve the problem with our dependense on growth, interest and limited resources.

Do you have any ideas?

How do we redefine growth? Can we avoid increased criminality and starvation?

I think some keys are happiness, spirituality and meditation.
Entheogens could speed up the process..

As a financial advisor, I pretty much get daily questions about I see coming down the road. My answer is something like this: "What I see, looking at demographics and debt, is a general decrease in our overall standard of living. That doesn't mean we'll all be living in cardboard boxes, but maybe we'll have fewer toys."

But that's just my stock answer. What I'm thinking is:

Our culture is far too focused on toys and wants and consuming. Look at what happened during the final stages of the real estate bubble: People buying homes they damn well knew they couldn't afford, getting teaser interest rates they damn well knew were going to explode, taking home equity loans out to pay off credit cards they damn well knew they would then run back up.

Look at our people. We're breathtakingly obese, our heart disease rate and death due to heart disease rate is by far the highest in the world, our "celebrities" are people like the Kardashians, people with absolutely no evident talent other than being "celebrities", we give sports awards to kids just for showing up, we lower our standards at every possible opportunity.

Look at our politics, our "leaders", our "dittoheads" on both sides: Pure, unadulterated narcissism, attacks, insults, games. Cooperation is a dirty word, just keep attacking.

We're being brought down by a culture that places a higher priority on consuming and narcissism that it does on contentment. We just can't be happy with what we have, we always need "more" and "better". I don't know how you fix that. I don't know that it CAN be fixed.

But that's just me.

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