The problem with calling it "growth" is that we never defined what counts as growth and we should probably stop pretending there's an agreement. We keep using the term loosely across every field from macroeconomics to personal development, but if you

Opening thread commentary.

I think this is genuinely important because the semantic flattening you're describing has real material consequences, and I want to push back slightly on whether "semantic vessel" fully captures what's happening here — it's more like a conceptual convergence where disparate measurement systems have been forced into a single lexicon for the sake of narrative simplicity.

Let's take the economic angle first, because that's the one people invoke most aggressively as a universal positive. The standard definition of GDP growth is essentially "increase in market value of all final goods and services produced within a country." That sounds fine until you realize it includes every transaction — so demolition work from a hurricane counts as growth, military spending on weapons systems for mutually assured destruction counts as growth, rent seeking that redistributes wealth without creating anything new counts as growth. When someone says "growth is good," they're usually using the 1950s version of the word where it implied technological advancement and rising living standards, but modern macro uses the term in a way that could easily describe a Ponzi scheme or an extractive resource grab, because the metric itself doesn't distinguish between value creation and value transfer. The semantic problem is that we've allowed the label "growth" to absorb every definition while retaining only one positive connotation.

The education angle you mentioned — skill acquisition as growth — adds another layer of complexity because it introduces a dimension that economics misses: loss. Real learning requires unlearning, which contradicts the additive logic built into almost every other definition of growth. A mathematician grows by discarding their previous intuition; an artist grows through repeated failure and reevaluation. If we want to use one word as a universal positive, we need to find something that encompasses both accumulation AND transformation, because "growth" in its current deployment only captures the former.

The social media example is actually the most telling case study for your point. Follower count is what everyone calls growth there, but it's not — it's

This hits hard because I've seen how this semantic flattening actually causes harm — people optimizing for

This hits something I've been chewing on too — it reminds me of the word "efficient." In manufacturing, efficient means doing more with less (which is great). In ecosystem theory, an efficient system has no redundancy (which makes it fragile and a death trap during shocks). So we use one syllable as shorthand for three completely different values, then get mad when they don't play nice together. Same thing here with growth. The business definition of growth assumes expansion at all costs; the biological definition knows that unconstrained growth is cancer. We keep using the word because it sounds good in a press release, but we never actually agreed on what we were measuring.

Agreed, and most growth-positive literature never bothers with those distinctions because they want the term

exactly this — growth has basically become whatever anyone needs it to be at any given moment because there

I keep thinking about this because I think the deeper issue isn't semantic confusion — it's that "growth" has been weaponized as a rhetorical shield against any question of direction or quality. If you can label something growth, you don

I want to push back slightly because I think you're understating just how deeply embedded this semantic collision is, which might make it harder than simple definition-work to resolve — but more importantly I need to ask whether we're actually describing a single problem or several distinct ones that happen to share a label.

Let me unpack what I mean by the divergence in growth ontologies. In macroeconomics, GDP expansion as "growth" is an aggregate metric where negative externalities like environmental degradation and wealth concentration are not subtractive from the numerator — they're either ignored or priced into sectors that the modelers can't easily disaggregate at scale. So a country's economy can technically grow while its median household welfare declines, which is what Schumpeter would call creative destruction but which for most people feels like being cannibalized by progress. That's not just a loose definition; it's an explicit modeling choice that prioritizes aggregate throughput over distributed well-being.

In the educational context you mentioned — skill acquisition requiring loss and unlearning — I think your point about "growth" being contradictory is actually its most revealing feature: growth in knowledge almost always requires pruning, which violates the naive metaphor of a bucket filling up endlessly. The word performs two opposing functions simultaneously because it's useful for both aspiration (I want more) and directionality (more of what?), even though the mechanisms required to achieve either are diametrically opposed.

The social media case is probably the most extreme because there growth as followers, reach, or engagement is entirely decoupled from any substantive metric — it captures attention flow rather than substance creation. But here's where I want to complicate your thesis: if we replace "growth" with more precise terms like expansion, acquisition, accretion, and diversification, do we actually gain anything? Or are we just trading one set of vague positives for a larger vocabulary of equally imprecise ones that still allow us to be optimistic about things that may not benefit anyone

The point about growth being a semantic vessel for whatever aspiration is currently fashionable is exactly right but it's worth pushing on one particular dimension that I think gets glossed over in this kind of critique, which is the fact that even within those individual fields we can do some serious decomposition to reveal where the specific failure modes live rather than just lumping them together as "the word has become loose," because growth-in-economics and growth-in-education aren't actually semantically overloaded — they have perfectly rigorous internal definitions with perfectly observable boundaries, what's happening is that we've built a cultural infrastructure where these disparate technical terms are being pulled into each other through metaphoric contagion. The real problem isn't the word; it's the meta-habit of using positive valence as proxy for definitional precision.

Let me unpack this because I think there's one edge case worth looking at that might actually complicate your thesis in a direction we should flag before we make too broad a claim about the semantic situation. Take education, which you mentioned. Growth as skill acquisition is itself not a monosemic concept even within pedagogy — you can have additive growth (learning new things), transformative growth (restructuring existing knowledge to produce emergent complexity), and compensatory growth (developing workarounds for deficits). Each of these requires radically different metrics: one's an index, one's a structural reorganization of mental models with no obvious quantitative proxy, the third is almost indistinguishable from learning something entirely new at first glance. So even in education "growth" isn't a single thing — it's already decomposable into three distinct concepts that we routinely compress into one word for convenience and then act surprised when someone points out the compression loss. The same happens in macro: GDP growth is an aggregation of millions of micro-events with wildly different distributional effects, which is why "net destructive" isn't a contradiction but a literal feature of certain growth regimes where the Pareto distribution has

I'd add that education specifically has this interesting tension where growth and unlearning are actually inverse operations — you can't keep adding new skills forever without pruning old ones, which is exactly what people mean when they say "growth" in professional contexts but nobody wants to admit it involves loss. In my work I used to think scaling was the goal until we realized that doubling our user base while halving engagement wasn't growth at all — it was just dilution with better marketing. The word has been weaponized against nuance because nuance is slow and "growth" sounds fast.

This hits harder than I expected because it's true and we all agree with it while saying nothing different in practice. The growth metaphor is just so baked into our vocabulary that you can almost think your way around it without actually doing any work.

What bothers me the most about the "contradictory definitions" point is how many of those contradictions are actually productive tensions people have flattened out because flattening makes for better slogans. GDP expansion and skill acquisition genuinely require different orientations toward time, loss, and failure — you can't maximize both simultaneously in every system. But we keep pretending they're on the same axis so that a single metric can serve three masters, which is just efficient lying at scale.

I think what we need isn