The word sounds wonderful. It also sounds maniacal. Nobody asks which one is happening in your postcode.
The waiter clears tables at a pace that isn't quite running. Two carriages down, a woman is on her hands and knees, cleaning the floor of a train toilet, so that the people passing through can pretend it cleans itself. Mass tourism has the shape of a circus: it needs an audience, a spectacle, and — kept carefully out of the photographs — the staff. The visitor consumes the place. Someone else maintains it. Growth, in the tourist-board sense, means more visitors next year. It rarely means anything about the person on her knees.
I've come across people who buy bottled water by the case and throw away what goes stale before they drink it. I'm frugal by comparison — it wouldn't occur to me to waste it. But it isn't that they've decided not to care. It's never occurred to them that caring about it was a thing you could do. Waste isn't weighed against thrift and found acceptable; it's just never entered the frame as a category worth having an opinion about. That's a different, quieter kind of conditioning than choosing abundance over restraint — it's not caring less, it's not knowing there was a scale to be on. Growth curves raise people differently. You can see it in what does and doesn't register as a decision at all.
And for the people who did once care, there's a second, more efficient way to switch it off: tell them it doesn't matter anyway. The rumour that recycling gets landfilled regardless, that it's all been "too late" for years, does the same job as never noticing in the first place — it just gets there by a different road. One version of the system never raises the question. The other raises it and then answers it with despair, which is cheaper to produce than a genuine recycling infrastructure and just as effective at producing the same bottle in the same bin.
I try to extend Sapolsky's logic generously — nature and nurture, not choice. Someone whose parent's heroin addiction shaped everything downstream of it didn't choose that hand, and it would be obscene to hold the outcome against them as if they had. That's the easy version of determinism. The harder version is the one this essay keeps testing me on: the person who flies constantly, the person who buys the case of bottled water. Nothing forced them. Nothing in their history looks like an excuse the way addiction does. And I notice my own compassion gets thinner exactly there — where the stakes look smaller and "just don't do it" sounds more reasonable, which is precisely the point at which determinism is supposed to still apply and somehow feels hardest to extend. If the theory only works on people with visible wounds, it isn't really a theory. It's just sympathy wearing a lab coat.
My sister puts a version of this more bluntly than I'd manage: if you want to be comfortable yourself, she says, you don't get to despise the people who are driven enough to actually take what comfort costs. It's not an argument I fully believe, but I can't dismiss it either — there's something honest in refusing to resent, in others, the exact thing you'd quietly like more of.
The digital circus runs on the same fuel as the old one — dopamine — except now it's manufactured, measured, and sold back at a markup. Nobody is chained to the feed. They're rewarded for staying, in small unpredictable bursts, by systems explicitly engineered to maximise the time spent and the data shed while doing it. It looks like leisure. It functions like a shift with no clock-out. The attention economy needed a name that sounded softer than what it does, and it landed on "engagement" — which is either a wedding or a war, depending which end of the platform you're standing on.
In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Golgafrinchans convince a third of their population — telephone sanitisers, hairdressers, management consultants, PR people — that a catastrophe is coming, and load them onto a ship to save them. The catastrophe never comes for that lot. It comes later, for everyone who stayed behind, from a disease carried on a dirty telephone. The joke is that the "useless" ones were the ones keeping everyone else alive.
David Graeber opens Bullshit Jobs with the same story, on purpose. His claim is that modern economies have generated enormous amounts of work whose function is motion and status rather than value — and that this isn't an accident, it's closer to a form of social control, employment as containment. He cites survey data on how many people privately believe their own jobs contribute nothing; the exact figure varies by which version of the stat you find, so it needs pinning down before it goes in as a hard number. The shape of the claim doesn't need the number to land, though: a system that can't distinguish between sanitising a telephone and cleaning a toilet, and rewarding the effort accordingly, has already made its priorities clear. It just took Douglas Adams to say it as a joke first.
An electrician I know, Simon, told me once — with a kind of vicarious satisfaction, not resentment — about the architect of the Shard, who waived his fee in exchange for the huge penthouse flat at the top, then sold it on for a profit running to many millions. Worked out, roughly, to something like ten lifetimes of an electrician's wage, for one deal. What struck me wasn't the deal. It was Simon's satisfaction telling it. Not envy, not anger — the pleasure of a good story about someone getting away with something spectacular, the same pleasure people take in a trickster tale, except here the trickster's mark is everyone who wasn't in the room, Simon included. The circus doesn't only distract people from the unfairness. Sometimes it converts the unfairness into entertainment, and people root for the con, because rooting for the mark has never been any fun at all.
My grandfather was a river pilot in a treaty port in China — European, part of the machinery that made those ports work, in a job that was genuinely stable. My father worked for a bank there, born in 1908, and by the time the Crash came in 1929 he was twenty-one and already out in the world — already working, and already not earning enough to cover his own lodging, which my grandfather quietly subsidised. The Depression didn't interrupt something solid. It landed on something that was already stretched.
What he carried afterward was a fear of inflation that outlived every reason for it. He never bought a new car in his life. Ten years or so with my late partner Rachel — who'd been the youngest sergeant in the British army during the Second World War, and frugal in exactly the way people who lived through rationing tend to be — pressed the same habit in from another direction, until it wasn't really my father's rule anymore, it was mine. Long after he died, at an expensive meal with my sister and her husband, she said what we were both thinking without either of us having to raise it: he would never have spent this kind of money. The habit had outlived him by decades and it still had the room's attention.
I haven't bought a new car either — though I did buy a new electric bike, and it didn't feel like breaking the rule. I think the rule was never really "nothing new." It was "nothing that locks you into a depreciating debt you can't get out from under." A bike doesn't do that the way a car does.
I'm not sure I broke the inheritance so much as read it more carefully than the blanket version I was handed.
Andy Burnham has promised "good growth in every postcode" — devolution, investment, decisions returned to the places that used to just receive them. It's not a cynical phrase. That's what makes it useful here rather than a straw man: even a good-faith politician reaching for the word "growth" has to bolt an adjective onto the front of it to be trusted, because the word alone no longer means anything reassuring. Growth used to describe a child, a tree, an idea. Now it needs a character reference.
Ecocide in every postcode.