Must We Thrive?
Must We Thrive?
Must We Thrive?
There is a type of economic spirit of the age — a human-economical Zeitgeist — that carries with it an unsettling premise: that we exist as biological production units, our worth measured by our output, our purpose defined as economic growth. The soul of this idea is captured by a phrase so familiar it passes as common wisdom: thrive, not survive. I find the expression nauseating. Why must we thrive? Why is being itself not enough?
The notion of the human as an economic unit has become so ingrained that it hides in plain sight. Read a book on productivity, a manual on business, or a text on economics, and somewhere beneath the arguments lies the same rationale: life is growth, and humans are the drivers of the machine. Our existence is framed as service to the collective GDP, our value determined by our contribution to expansion. Even self-help literature borrows the vocabulary, promising “growth” in personal terms as if the individual were another company to manage. This way of thinking, repeated endlessly, becomes difficult to separate from the way we understand life itself.
Yet the premise is both obscure and insulting. Obscure, because the link between life and economic growth is not natural but constructed, built out of centuries of habits, theories, and institutions that treat expansion as destiny. Insulting, because it reduces the richness of being to a single dimension: output. We are asked to equate our purpose with the logic of accumulation. To thrive means to produce; to survive means to fail. The binary is so narrow it erases other possibilities of living.
The phrase thrive not survive carries a moral undertone. It suggests that bare survival is insufficient, almost shameful. Thriving, by contrast, becomes not only desirable but obligatory. The injunction is internalized: one must always be improving, climbing, producing. Standing still is not permitted. But this framing conceals an irony. The demand to thrive often keeps people hovering at the threshold of survival — working longer hours, taking on debt, sacrificing rest — all in the name of growth. The promised thriving recedes into the distance like a horizon, always visible but never reached.
There are, of course, other ways of conceiving thriving. To thrive might mean to write, to travel, to teach, to create — to pursue ways of being that are not reducible to financial return. To thrive in this sense is not to outcompete but to inhabit. It is closer to the botanical metaphor the word once carried: to grow into one’s own form, to unfold according to one’s nature. Such thriving may, ironically, lead to economic freedom, but it does so as a by-product, not as a premise. The economic outcome follows from being, rather than the other way around.
The difficulty is that such alternatives are marginal within the current order. The prevailing Zeitgeist treats all activity as a form of economic contribution. A teacher is framed in terms of workforce preparation, an artist in terms of creative industries, and a traveller in terms of tourism revenue. Even leisure is monetized through the metrics of productivity and performance. What does not feed the machine risks invisibility or dismissal. The cult of thriving swallows its own critique.
This is not entirely new. The idea of life as economic contribution can be traced to the industrial era, when time itself was recalibrated into units of work, and efficiency became the measure of value. But in earlier moments, survival carried its own dignity. To endure harsh conditions, to sustain a family or a community, was understood as meaningful in itself. Today, survival is treated as a failure, an inability to thrive. The baseline of sufficiency has been stripped of respect, leaving only the demand for more.
There is a cost to living under this regime. To be told that one must always thrive is to live under a permanent state of insufficiency. Enough is never enough; there is always more to pursue, more to prove. The result is exhaustion disguised as ambition. Burnout is reframed as a failure of personal resilience rather than a symptom of structural demands. The human is caught in a loop where thriving means working beyond capacity, and survival means falling behind.
Against this, the simple act of being can feel radical. To write without market calculation, to teach without measuring outcomes, to travel without commodifying the experience — these modes of being resist the equation of life with growth. They allow a different kind of thriving, one rooted in presence rather than accumulation. But because they cannot be easily quantified, they remain precarious, tolerated only as long as they can be justified in economic terms.
The question is not only whether we can find space for such alternatives, but whether we can reimagine the premise itself. What would it mean to live in a society where being was enough? Where thriving was measured not by productivity but by the unfolding of life in its varied forms? The difficulty of asking the question shows how deeply the cult of thriving has taken hold. To imagine being without growth feels irresponsible, even dangerous. Yet perhaps the greater danger lies in continuing to accept the formula: human life as a unit of output, existence as a function of GDP.
We may not be able to abandon the economic frame entirely. But we can notice its grip, and in noticing, begin to loosen it. If thriving means only producing, the circle will tighten until it chokes. If thriving can also mean being, perhaps we might begin to recover a freedom that has long been hidden in plain sight.