More or Less

Growth, restraint, and the strange alliances forming around the future

A note: This article is a bit of a different tone than my usual writing, but this subject has been on my mind lately, and I hope you find this thought-provoking.

A climate activist in Portland wants to decarbonize the economy. A homeschooling mom in Tennessee wants to raise goats and teach her kids Latin. They don’t vote the same way, but they might tell you the same thing: The American Dream is not a single vision.

It’s easy to miss just how weird this moment is—ideologically, morally, even spiritually. Across the spectrum, people are disillusioned. Growth feels hollow. Technology feels predatory. Progress, as it’s currently defined, often feels like drift.

Yet the proposed solutions couldn’t be more different.

Some say we need abundance: more housing, energy, and freedom to build. Others say we need degrowth: less ambition, less consumption, fewer illusions.

And that tension—between abundance and restraint—is starting to rearrange our culture in ways that don’t fit neatly on a left-right axis. If you squint, you’ll notice something striking:

The actual fault lines today aren’t just political. They’re philosophical. And they aren’t just about what we have. They’re about who we’re becoming.

At bottom, we’re not just debating policy—we’re debating whether the good life requires more… or less.

We’ve been trained to imagine political debate as a line: progressives on one end, conservatives on the other. Redistribution vs. hierarchy. Change vs. tradition. Techno-optimism vs. techno-panic.

But that old map is increasingly useless.

Instead, we’re seeing a grid—or maybe a moral compass with different groups navigating different questions entirely. A few examples:

None of these are simple binaries, but they shape how we argue (and avoid arguing) about everything from housing policy to artificial intelligence to the very question of whether people should have more children.

Four Corners of the Conversation

To make this more concrete, imagine four archetypes—composites of real people shaping public thought today:

The Builder

Meet Taylor, a city planner in Raleigh. Taylor wants to build more homes, transit, and nuclear power. Think Ezra Klein meets Strong Towns. Believes justice means expanding capacity. Growth isn’t the enemy—exclusion is.

The Simplicity Radical

Reads degrowth theory and Wendell Berry in the same breath. Advocates shrinking the economy to restore ecological sanity. Believes the planet, not the market, should set the limits.

The Techno-Futurist

Quotes Peter Thiel, worries about “The Great Stagnation,” and funds moonshot projects. Believes that if we don’t innovate boldly, we die slowly. Thinks moral clarity is essential—but so is Mars.

The Moral Traditionalist

Wants to live in a way that honors limits, roots, and a sense of the sacred. Deeply skeptical of both tech elites and progressive abundance. Not trying to maximize outcomes—trying to live minimally.

If you’re like me, you might find yourself nodding to something in each of them—and also cringing at times. That’s okay. The point isn’t to pick a team. The point is to realize that these are wildly different viewpoints and what we’re called to do with finding our place within—or rather outside—of them.

What's Forming Us?

As someone shaped by a conservative tradition that values order, stewardship, and moral clarity, I keep coming back to formation. Not just what we believe or build—but what kind of people we’re becoming.

Are our tools shaping us toward humility, stewardship, and self-giving love? Or toward optimization, acceleration, and anxiety?

Are our stories about the future training us to hope—or to hustle?

It’s no coincidence these debates are escalating in a media environment that rewards outrage, moral certainty, and acceleration. When every trend is a feed-scroll away, the future feels urgent and impossible.

Still, if we pursue abundance without attention to formation, we’ll end up with more of what’s deforming us.

Here’s a better question than “What is driving your viewpoint?”:

What vision of the good life is shaping your desires?

• Do you long for more because you hope to include others or fear being left behind?

• Do you embrace limits because you believe they’re life-giving or because the world feels like too much?

Every movement in this conversation—abundance, degrowth, tradition, acceleration—contains both virtues and temptations. And all of them are wrestling with the same thing: how to live well in a world that feels like it’s coming unmoored.

A Closing Invitation

You don’t have to resolve this today. I won’t be either.

But I do think we need more spaces—not fewer—where people can ask questions like:

• What kind of future are we being formed to desire?

• What kind of sacrifices will that future demand?

• And what if the answer isn’t more or less, but something more like rightly ordered?

As always, I welcome your thoughts. We may be living through collapse. Or we may just be choosing the shape of the next world.

Let’s do it carefully, together.