Have you thought about what kind of world we're leaving behind for the next generation? What's left of this "growth" will be captured by people who are currently alive.

The next generation, the ones that are supposed to benefit from this, will be left paying the bill and dealing with the fallout. Forget about growth, mere stagnation will feel like a dream outcome when the systems we took for granted start collapsing - food and water shortages, mass migrations of people who used to prop up lifestyles of rich countries. Natural disasters that increase to the point where you're stuck in a perpetual cycle of rebuilding and trying to mitigate the next one.

Those people won't thank us for our "enlightened" pursuit of growth, they'll talk about our abject arrogance and ignorance in disbelief.

> Our society is based on the promise to our children that they will be better off than what we were.

This phenomenon stopped a long time ago in the USA - with each successive generation since the 1940s, wealth has concentrated further in older generations.

Of course that's largely because the supply of various asset classes (i.e. housing) ceased to grow at their previous rates, so prices have skyrocketed, and the capital gains accumulate to the older generations who own the most property.

It requires increased productivity, which can be driven by growth, but also without (population) growth.

That promise has already been broken for most of the western world.