the modern economy needs constant and indefinite growth in order to survive. If growth ever stops, the economy won’t settle down to some cosy equilibrium; it will fall to pieces. That’s why capitalism encourages us to seek immortality, happiness and divinity. There’s a limit to how many shoes we can wear, how many cars we can drive and how many ski

the modern world provides an inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you’d ideally like to do and what you actually can do. As the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa explains, premodern people weren’t much troubled by such thoughts, partly because they believed in an aft

Now it’s up to us to reconsider these old questions. What is growth? What is progress? Or even more fundamentally, what makes life truly worthwhile?

The slow-life strategy has grown with each generation, delaying traditional milestones at every stage of the life cycle. Children are safer but less independent; teens are less likely to drink alcohol, drive, or work; young adults postpone marriage, children, and careers; the middle-aged feel and act younger; and seniors work and travel at older ag