We have inherited a peculiar belief: that growth is always good.
From GDP curves to startup culture, from performance metrics to personal ambition, expansion has become synonymous with success. To grow is to advance. To scale is to win. To want more is to be alive.
But ecological rewilding tells a different story.
In ecosystems, not all growth is beneficial. Unchecked expansion leads to imbalance — forests overtaken by invasive species, rivers flooding beyond their banks, monocultures replacing biodiversity. Nature thrives not through constant acceleration, but through dynamic balance.
If ecological rewilding teaches us anything about productivity, it is that not all growth is good. Modern societies, however, glorify a singular path to success: relentless expansion. More work, more production, more accumulation. But perhaps true prosperity is not about having more, but about needing less.
One countercurrent to the ideology of perpetual expansion is the degrowth movement — a philosophy that resonates deeply with the principles of rewilding. Degrowth does not mean decline or stagnation. Rather, it proposes a conscious recalibration: an approach to living that values sufficiency over excess and balance over extraction.
Emerging more formally after the first international degrowth conference in Paris in 2008, the movement has since gained momentum. Its central mantra — “share and live more simply” — challenges the dominant doctrine of “work more, earn more, consume more.” It calls into question the assumption that well-being must be tethered to economic expansion.
In essence, degrowth is an act of rewilding. It involves disentangling ourselves from industrial-era conditioning and rediscovering more natural ways of thriving. It embraces voluntary simplicity, not as deprivation but as liberation. It encourages circular economies that repurpose waste, design that prioritizes longevity over spectacle, and biodiversity over monoculture.
Just as ecological rewilding means stepping back and allowing ecosystems to regain balance, rewilding human life may require relinquishing control — allowing life to unfold in ways that defy the logic of productivity.
Importantly though, rewilding does not mean rewinding. It is not a nostalgic return to some imagined past. It is an opening toward untamed possibilities. It invites us to redefine success, to step outside rigid expectations and recognize that flourishing can take many forms.
The first step in human rewilding — and in degrowth — is breaking free from unnecessary accumulation. The next is practicing abundance differently: not as a measure of wealth, but as an experience of connection.
I was reminded of this recently through a story that quietly unsettled the logic of upward mobility.
A Balinese woman worked at an eco-community, a small network of family homes for expatriates. She was talented, service-minded, and by Western standards, ambitious. As the community expanded, she was offered a managerial role: higher pay, increased responsibility, professional advancement.
She declined.
When asked why, she simply replied, “I am happy with my job as it is. It provides a good balance in my life. I do not wish for more responsibilities or to be part of the expansion.”
Her decision puzzled the board. It disrupted the dominant narrative that equates progress with upward mobility. Instead of seeking more, she chose equilibrium. Rather than being swept into constant striving, she opted for sufficiency.
Her answer contained a quiet radicalism. It asked: what if success is not defined by expansion, but by balance?
A similar philosophy lives, in a different register, in my youngest son.
Reading and writing did not initially come easily to him; those skills felt burdensome and abstract. But when it comes to reading nature, he is extraordinary.
“When the cicadas’ song turns into loud screams at sunset, it means rain is coming,” he once told me. And again and again, he has been right.
He traces patterns in the sand and identifies which creatures passed hours earlier. He reads wind in treetops and knows when a storm approaches. He understands that fallen trees and shifting tides are forms of communication.
To him, the natural world is a book — and he reads it fluently.
He also knows how to make paint from minerals, prepare indigo paste for dyeing cloth, craft paper from discarded scraps, plant gardens with an instinctive understanding of pollination, build small windmills, navigate with a compass, and identify edible plants.
He is not learning in the way modern education dictates. Yet he is thriving in a way that feels deeply, innately human.
In a growth-obsessed society, such knowledge is often considered peripheral. But perhaps it is central. Perhaps it represents another literacy — one grounded in relationship rather than extraction.
Rewilding — whether of ecosystems, societies, or ourselves — demands that we loosen rigid expectations and allow multiple forms of flourishing. It asks us to question whether productivity is always synonymous with expansion, or whether it might instead mean vitality.
To need less can be a form of abundance.
To resist unnecessary growth can be an act of ecological intelligence.
And to define success on our own terms — as the Balinese woman did, as my son instinctively does — may be one of the most radical gestures available to us.
Rewilding productivity does not require abandoning ambition. It requires reorienting it. Toward balance. Toward sufficiency. Toward lives that feel inhabited rather than optimized.
True abundance may not lie in accumulation, but in depth. Not in scaling endlessly upward, but in widening outward.
—
This post was previously published on medium.com.
Love relationships? We promise to have a good one with your inbox.
Subcribe to get 3x weekly dating and relationship advice.
Did you know? We have 8 publications on Medium. Join us there!
***
–
Photo credit: Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash
