How Much Is Too Much?
Lessons from nature
How many possessions do you personally need? When is a business too big? How much economic growth is too much? How much is too much?
When we look at nature, we can see examples of thousands of places where a balance of growth is being struck. Just look at how big the leaves or needles of the nearest tree are. They could have evolved to be any size — but this size has been the most successful after millions of years of trial and error.
Your body is a specific size too. Maybe you’re still growing, maybe you’ve stopped. But in either case you can expect not to grow forever. At some point the human body is done growing larger. And that’s a good thing.
We can know this is a good thing because our early ancestors actually never stopped growing. It’s been through billions of years of the evolutionary process that nature figured out over and over it’s actually optimal in most cases to say “this much is enough”.
Many animals still have a limited form of this trait and grow through their entire lifespans, such as lobsters and many crabs, but even in these cases there’s usually a genetically wired mechanism for slowing down the rate of physical growth over time.
This trait of “indeterminate growth” has even led to myths that these animals are immortal, so much so that the idiom “thinking about the immortality of the crab”, is often used in Spanish (“Pensando en la inmortalidad del cangrejo”) when someone is daydreaming.
As a brief aside, I only this morning heard this statement for the first time and started literally daydreaming about the lifespan of crabs, then looking up scientific facts about it. That’s how I found the article that inspired me to write this post, an exploration of the fact that the first life forms all grew without stopping, but over and over in many different cases at many different points in time, most animals and plants independently evolved the ability to stop their own growth at an optimal size.
Thinking about the parallels between biological evolution and the evolution of social agreements over time, this little meander through my brain reminded me of economist Kate Raworth’s call for 21st century economists to “Be Agnostic About Growth”.
We can’t keep pushing for each hour of each person’s day to get more productive than ever before. We can’t keep pushing for more materials to be extracted from the earth each quarter than the last. We can’t keep pretending that an increase in Gross Domestic Product is always a good thing.
We are relatively young as a globalized superorganism. Because of this, we’re making the mistakes most young people have to make. We’re finding our limits, pushing our boundaries, and learning the consequences.
Our most distant ancestors made these same mistakes and learned that the best strategy is to choose a point to stop focusing on growth. All animals now either stop growing at an optimal size or slow their growth down significantly. Nature is showing us a blueprint for whenever we’re ready to listen.
Indigenous societies around the globe, including my own in what is now Poland, also learned this lesson in their own ways and eventually lived in balance with nature as a result. This remained the case almost everywhere on our globe in different ways up until being conquered by a very young outside culture still addicted to endless growth.
This conquering society most of us are now beholden to is still likely to be stupid and young for a while, but even so, the mainstream is already growing more of a conscience for the limits and needs of our planet and our societies. The same lesson is being learned again.
We know this is the case because the hungriest parts of this society, which have always been addicted to growth, are now finding entire growing movements of social and environmental justice they have to push against. They’re becoming inflamed and angry, but we know strategies of endless growth and consumption will ultimately lose. We know this because even with nature’s trial and error testing its limits over and over for billions of years, balance has been the only long term solution.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t fight back proactively. When a cell in our bodies loses the genetic boundaries that limit our own endless growth, it’s called a cancer. This is a time to be serious about following nature’s wisdom. We need a robust social immune system that knows to set boundaries about how much is enough, and that calls out the drive for endless consumption for what it is — a threat to our collective survival.
So let’s ask in each area of our lives and societies: “How much is enough?” “How can we learn from the balances in nature?” “When is it best to stop focusing on growth and start focusing on life?”
We already talk about minimum wages, so maybe let’s explore conversations about maximum wages too. We already try (and often fail) to limit corporate monopolies — what might happen if we establish a maximum business size? What happens if we aim for a stable level of economic activity that is balanced to sustain in a healthy work week while meeting everybody’s needs instead of aiming for a constant increase in GDP or quarterly stock market returns?
These are not immediate or magical solutions, but the concept of “enough” has to be rooted in our vocabularies and our ways of engaging with the world as we build towards future systems with security and abundance for all, such as the ones I fight for in my currency justice activism.
Animals don’t think or move indefinitely fast, because our speed has to balance with available energy. Our data centers and AI supercomputers also need to strike the same balance. We don’t get indefinitely big, or have indefinite strength, or have impervious skin, or see in all levels and bandwidths of light.
Our limitations are not shortcomings of evolution — they’re optimizations. These are the balance points found to be the best possible strategies so far. Our future societies and social agreements and technologies will also have the benchmark of beautiful limits and boundaries that are not shortcomings, but are the best possible strategies after all of our trial and error.
Just look at nature — she’s got this balance in the bag.
Thanks for thinking about the immortality of the crab with me,
—
Alex