A child sits at breakfast. He wants another slice of toast, with jam and peanut butter. Sod the allergy. An empty plate, he insists, is not progress. In his gut, better is not about quality. He’s a hungry animal that craves more P&J. Civilisation and his parents oblige.
His and every generation is promised boundless improvement, as if more is both natural law and moral right.
Ecological warnings rarely dent this logic. If limits exist, they must apply elsewhere. Here, at the breakfast bar, little Johnny keeps eating.
His father imagines what his son might achieve in a world of opportunity where progress equates to accumulation. Economic expansion, rising living standards, aspirational consumerism will give Johnny his chance to have and be more, all he needs is the instinct to consume, to accumulate, and to call each step advancement.
Institutions, families, and entire cultures are structured around the idea that each generation deserves, and will get, more than the last.
Yet, the planet’s accounting ledger tells another story, one with columns for entropy, depletion, and overshot limits, and not a hint of sentimentality.
Counterpoint
No one sells a future of enough, sufficient.
The better–for-your-kids story is the advertising industry’s lever but also the ethos of every parental sacrifice and every policy platform. Progress is always one jump away, just around the next consumer corner. Ignore the biophysical ledger because upward curves are everywhere.
This illusion holds only at the margin.
Once the dance of more collides with planetary boundaries, the story breaks. More cannot be universal. There is no conceivable biophysical arrangement where all eight billion humans enjoy Western levels of affluence, at least not without burning through the source of all affluence and pumping the planet with waste.
This is a horrible realisation if you are from Sydney’s north shore affluence, where people might start to feel the threats to their opulence. It is just as horrible, more so, in the informal settlements in Mumbai, Manila or Montevideo where more making is hard. It sets up a zero-sum game that is scary for everyone.
Protecting everyone from the truth is the myth that better is an attainable target. All we have to do is ignore the constraints and imagine persistent growth, decoupling, technological rescue rather than the ecological rules and the laws of thermodynamics.
Every serious study of resource flows, nutrient cycles, trophic limits, and thermodynamic accounting says that collectively, the better cannot be attained by all and the attempt ensures most get less.
Thought Challenges
Inspect a billboard or Instagram ad offering a future for your children… How does it conflate aspiration with obligation? Does it present more as safety, status, virtue? Draft a list of what is left unspoken about ecological debt, labour, and global disparity.
Identify a catastrophe in progress… fisheries collapse, topsoil exhaustion, regional water depletion. Map the sequence from production, consumption, overshoot, to collapse. Which part of the process was branded as progress? Which warning signs were ignored because they clashed with the imperative for better?
Compose your own reckoning… what is the minimum, for you, that feels like enough? Where has aspiration carried you past sufficiency? Name the line between satisfaction and hunger stuffed with promise.
Closing Reflection
Civilised comfort for a billion or so living a Western lifestyle is bought on a line of credit with the biosphere. And yet instinct wants more; advertisement upgrades want to infinity.
But entropy waits for no man.
It is time to forget the promise of perpetual better. What endures is what the planet can spare, and everything else is speculative fiction.
Evidence Support
Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockström, J., Cornell, S. E., Fetzer, I., Bennett, E. M., ... & Sörlin, S. (2015). Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science, 347(6223), 1259855.
TL;DR… refines the concept of ‘planetary boundaries’—thresholds in Earth’s life support systems that, if crossed, put humanity at risk of destabilising biophysical processes. It shows that several boundaries (e.g., for biodiversity, nutrient flows) are already exceeded, due to rising consumption and development.
Relevance to insight… draws a clear line between human ambitions for more and the ecological realities that limit safe expansion. It exposes how “better” cannot be delivered to all when systems supporting life are overshot.
Wiedmann, T., Lenzen, M., Keyßer, L. T., & Steinberger, J. K. (2020). Scientists’ warning on affluence. Nature Communications, 11, 3107.
TL;DR… affluence, fuelled by consumption growth in wealthy countries, is the strongest driver of environmental impacts from resource use, emissions, and biodiversity loss. No technological fixes currently match the pace or scale of material throughput required by current lifestyles.
Relevance to insight… dispels the myth that innovation or efficiency alone can reconcile consumer aspiration with a finite planet. The “consumption imperative” is revealed to be physically incompatible with biospheric stability.
Dasgupta, P. (2021). The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. London: HM Treasury.
TL;DR… empirical evidence that mainstream economic models fail to account for natural capital limits, encouraging overconsumption and ecosystem collapse. It recommends a total revaluation of progress and legacy to treat nature as integral, not external.
Relevance to insight… the unchecked drive for more—not just for individuals but societies and policy—is financially, ecologically, and morally bankrupt eventually.
O’Neill, D. W., Fanning, A. L., Lamb, W. F., & Steinberger, J. K. (2018). A good life for all within planetary boundaries. Nature Sustainability, 1(2), 88-95.
TL;DR… maps 151 countries against indicators of social development and environmental sustainability, finding that most high-consumption societies dramatically exceed ecological limits, while those living within limits rarely achieve popular metrics of “good life.”
Relevance to insight… the modern definition of a “better” life is not universally achievable. The research underscores the friction between individual/societal aspiration and collective ecological constraint.
Jackson, T. (2009). Prosperity without growth? The transition to a sustainable economy. Sustainable Development Commission, UK.
TL;DR… limitless economic growth driven by consumption is neither possible nor desirable in a world of finite resources. He advocates for prosperity redefined by sufficiency, not perpetual escalation.
Relevance to insight… interrogates the myth of endless betterment and offers practical policy guidance for disentangling human flourishing from material throughput.
These papers collectively document that Some more, please? is not only a cultural and psychological driver, but is ultimately self-defeating for both individuals and societies once the underlying biophysical limits are violated. Each provides concrete evidence for the necessity of redefining progress and sufficiency in a finite world.
Excellent framing of the conflict between aspirational consumption and thermodynamic reality. The breakfast toast metaphor works well because it shows how deeply the more imperative is embedded from childhood, almost before reason kicks in. The zero-sum realization between affluent suburbs and informal settlements is what nobody wants to confront publicly, but the planetary boundaries research makes it mathematicaly unavoidable once you map material flows honestly.