Why is it that the myth of never-ending growth has been so compelling to us, despite the fact that is obviously so flawed? In part, I think it is because it chimes so well with something deeply personal and individual for all of us: the idea of a constant striving to belong. In his famous novel, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald beautifully encapsulates the sense of material wealth replacing a sense of belonging for the characters. The novel ends with these poetic words:

Gatsby believed in the green light. The orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

It is in the constant craving for the elusive tomorrow that we are seduced into wanting more and never being satisfied with what we have. And as Fitzgerald suggests, this requires us to look back into our own systems. This collective cultural longing calls on each of us to look ‘into the past’ of our own lives and ask, ‘Who am I being loyal to?’, ‘Who am I doing this for?’, or ‘What pain am I to heal?’ As Fitzgerald’s famous novel helps us realize (and as we have explored earlier in this book), it is only when we attend to our own longing – and belonging – that we can be free of the allure of wanting more. This chimes with the definition of addiction that we explored in the last chapter. Returning to Gabor Mate’s work, he describes asking the addicts he works with what they gain from the particular substances they take:

I ask them, ‘What in the short term, did it give you that you craved or liked so much?’ And universally, the answers are, ‘It helped me escape emotional pain; helped me deal with stress; gave me peace of mind, a sense of connection with others, a sense of control.’

Why never-ending growth is a myth that doesn’t make us happy