I saw a video the other day explaining our persistence in performing the rituals of continual economic growth year after year by likening it to the Cargo Cults that formed in the Pacific after WWII.

We're going through the motions of consumption, consumerism, and expansion, hoping that mid-century prosperity drops from the sky again.

It's like we're treating infinite growth as a law of nature, a gift from our ancestors, completely ignoring that the system we're running is entirely incompatible with the physical constraint of the world we live in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult