Why life gets harder even when the economy grows
I've always found it rather amusing that the arseholes who guide our financial destinies look at the world through a completely different lens to the rest of us. They sit in their glass towers, staring at graphs that point majestically toward the heavens, and they tell us that everything is splendid. The gross domestic product is up, the markets are thriving, and we should all be skipping down the high street with joy.
Yet, if you step outside and look at the actual folk navigating that high street, you don't see joy. You see a look of collective exhaustion. It's a preposterous riddle that defines our modern existence, which is that the more the economy grows, the harder it becomes to simply live a peaceful life.
I've come to realise that the economic metrics of success are entirely divorced from human sanity. The gross domestic product is a marvellous fiction because it measures activity, not well-being. If you have the misfortune to crash your motorcar into a shop window, the economy celebrates. Why?
You've created work for the tow truck, the glazier, the insurance clerk, and perhaps a couple of NHS doctors.
Money changes hands, the graphs tick upward, and the experts declare it a triumph. But your week is ruined, your insurance premium skyrockets, and your neck hurts. We've built a world where disaster and complication are highly profitable, whilst quiet contentment is a financial dead end.
As the economy expands, it doesn't make life simpler. It demands an ever-increasing layer of complexity to justify its own growth. We don't get the leisure time we were promised by the futurists of the mid 20th century. Instead, we get an endless parade of administrative nightmares. We're saddled with compliance officers, data analysts, and an infinite number of passwords to remember just to access our own money.
I spent forty minutes the other morning trying to speak to a person about a routine utility bill, only to be trapped in an automated telephone menu loop narrated by a robotic voice that repeatedly assured me my call was important. That's the true tax of economic growth. It's the systematic theft of our time and patience. We've managed to automate efficiency whilst completely eradicating helpfulness.
Then there's the madness of commercialisation. To keep the growth engine chugging along, things that used to be free or simple must now be parcelled up and sold back to us. You can't just buy a piece of software anymore, you have to subscribe to it in perpetuity. You can't just park your car, you must download an app, register your life history, and pray the signal works before the traffic warden spots you. We're constantly running just to stay in the exact same place, paying more for the privilege of doing the work that companies used to pay employees to do for us.
Everything is optimised, streamlined, and hollowed out. You pay a small fortune for a railway ticket only to spend the journey jammed into a corridor next to a broken toilet, whilst the train operating company releases a press release about their record efficiency. It's a grand fucking farce.
We're told that growth is the only way forward, but it feels very much like being stuck on a treadmill that someone keeps speeding up without asking permission. We're richer on paper, perhaps, but we're utterly impoverished when it comes to time, space, and peace of mind. If this is what winning looks like, I'd desperately like to know what it would take to comfortably lose.