General Motors, humanity lost but not hopeless. Today I visited a ski museum and discovered that even the birds there have evolved built-in snow boots, with feathers extending all the way to their toes. Nature spent millions of years training to create this hardware. Humans, however, merely use tools to crack it, seizing opportunities in an endless game of growth, surpassing evolution. But what use are new inventions after standing at the top of the food chain for millennia? Few stop to consider what "meaningful growth" is, why everyone is striving so desperately for "growth," and why this game, whether at the individual or national level, is such a zero-sum game, even a losing proposition. We are victims of our own success: the more "efficient" we are, the lower our fertility; the more "effective" we are, the lonelier we become.