It’s the middle of summer, and I’m sitting in our north-facing ‘climate-friendly garden’. A plane flies over my head every two minutes, as if COVID-19 never happened. And in my hands I’m holding my newborn daughter: a tiny little person, wrapped in a wool blanket.
At the same time, all kinds of complicated thoughts are running through my head. I’ve made a person. It’s hardly possible to get closer to nature. But I’m at home too, with one task: keeping the baby alive. As an entrepreneur and idealist, I feel a bit useless. In addition to feeding, changing and gazing at my baby with wonder, I spend my days reading, and there is increasing space to think, and even philosophize. Through the sleepless nights, strange thoughts sometimes arise that I immediately wave away or drink away with a delicious cup of coffee. But some of those thoughts keep coming back.
I look at my daughter, at how small she is, how innocent, how beautiful. At the same time, that little person is now growing the fastest she ever will: in the first three weeks, she has already grown almost eight centimeters longer and gained 130% in weight. After this first period of steep growth, it levels off, because that is natural.
Yet I find myself in a world of unnatural exponential growth. As an entrepreneur, you are only successful to the outside world if you’re a ‘unicorn’. And as a unicorn, your business model is aimed at exponential growth, since it’s only then interesting for an investor to put their money into it, in order to watch it grow for their own profit. It’s that exponential growth that makes you fantastic, but from my perspective they are a bunch of fantasists. The downside of that growth is seldom discussed, though I’m seeing more and more articles about post-growth thinking in mainstream media channels.
I watch what’s happening around me with pain and suffering. The ‘growth imperative’, as Jason Hickel calls it, is so deeply rooted in our economy that it’s almost inescapable. With the small and large incentives offered in the system, as an entrepreneur, you are invariably pushed towards ‘becoming bigger’. At Copper8, we try to be resilient to those incentives. One of our missions is to be an experiment for an organization that doesn’t just talk about post-growth, but also puts it into practice.
The great thing about being an experiment is that the successes can exist alongside the mistakes, because experimenting is always a matter of trial and error. In the meantime, we have more than a decade of lessons to share about how difficult it is to swim against the current of economic growth. But those are precisely the lessons I want to share.
And that’s why I have a resolution… Together with my colleague Lucie Jansen, I’ll be highlighting one of these lessons every month for the coming months. We hope to inspire other organizations with these lessons. But we also want to broaden and deepen the conversation about post-growth, because in our opinion it’s not about whether you are a supporter or an opponent, it’s about us collectively seeing and understanding the system. Only then can we swim against that current together and slowly build up an alternative, in which a growth curve that levels off is the norm not only for babies, but also for successful companies.