Everything in Moderation

Enough is Enough

Is it just me, or did most of us learn the “everything in moderation” lesson growing up? The idea has been around about as long as we’ve been writing down our good ideas.

You can trace the idea of “everything in moderation” back to ancient Greece. The Greek poet Hesiod wrote “observe due measure; moderation is best in all things”. Plato advised to “avoid excess.” The Romans stole … sorry … borrowed the idea from the Greeks while they were busy borrowing Greek mythology. The Roman writer Plautus wrote, “moderation in all things is the best policy.”

We seem to have lost that message somewhere along the way.

If the degrowth movement needs a slogan, “everything in moderation,” wouldn’t be a bad place to start. The economic, political and cultural systems we now operate under certainly don’t do moderation well. These pictures are just a few that tell that story well.

This is not moderation my friends.

No moderation in resource use.

Nope. No moderation in hoarding wealth.

Moderation keeps you alive.

Nearly everything that is good for us, will also kill us if used to excess.

Too much oxygen, or oxygen toxicity, is a condition resulting from the harmful effects of breathing molecular oxygen (O2) at increased partial pressures. Severe cases can result in cell damage and death, with effects most often seen in the central nervous system, lungs, and eyes.

To much water can be the result of drowning of course but can also result from just drinking too much water. If someone drinks too much water in a short period of time, the kidneys cannot process it fast enough and the blood becomes waterlogged. Most cells can expand some, but cells in the brain, where space is tight have limited capacity to do so. This can lead to and edema or swelling in the brain. There have been plenty of instances where people died from drinking too much water due to a dare or as the result of hazing.

If everything good in life can kill you if done in excess, where did we ever get the damn fool idea that economic growth, done to excess, is good for us?

We have met the enemy and it is us.

Poor Simon Kuznets was just doing his job when he invented GDP in the mid-1930’s when he was tasked with a way of measuring economic output. In fairness to Kuznets, what he did wasn’t revolutionary. In more fairness to Kuznets, he warned that GDP should not be used as a tool to measure the success of an economy, because all it did was add up everything that the economy produced.

But that is exactly what we did. Investors, companies, politicians, you know, the people that matter, all use GDP to tell us if we are succeeding as a society. Therefore more growth is always good, no matter the consequences. The death knell for “everything in moderation” began the day Kuznets finished his work.

But we don’t have to live in an everything to excess world.

We can see the results are destroying our world and our ability to have a fulfilling life in it.

How do we get back to “everything in moderation?”

Say it with me now …

Degrowth is the Answer.

Most of the people I know who believe degrowth is part of the answer aren’t socialist, communists, are ardent anti-capitalists.

They are simply people who understand that “everything in moderation” works, and “everything in excess” usually ends badly, and that even the things that we need to live like oxygen and water will kill us quickly if we overdose on them.

We are currently overdosing on consumption, and growth because that is the way our economies are wired. That is how we are incentivized to live our lives. We must work to overproduce and over consume so that we can keep growing and slowly (but at an accelerating pace) destroying our world. That is, in a word … insane.

Sanity means stepping back from that brink and living lives of moderation, which is still a more fantastic life than those of 99% of the humans who have ever lived.

That has to be enough. If it is not enough, humanity may have had enough.