You don't have a growth problem. You have a needs problem.

Hello, I'm so happy to see you here!

I have a story for you.

Two years ago, I bought twelve apartments. Yes. 12. Including a building.

Am I crazy? Maybe.

But I clearly did not wake up one morning burning to become a landlord. Quite the contrary. It happened the way these things usually happen: someone pushed. And then pushed again. "This is what people like you do. This is how you make your money work. You are an independant woman with no retirement plan. Protect yourself!" The word need never came up once, because it was never about a need. It was about a want, dressed up in the language of prudence.

Today I own twelve apartments and a permanent low-grade headache. Late or no payments, destructions, lies, paperwork. I have no desire to manage any of it. And when I am honest with myself, I never wanted the apartments at all. I wanted security. What I bought was twelve new sources of the opposite.

Here is the uncomfortable part, and the reason I am telling you this. No one ever asked me the only question that mattered: what is this actually for? I had confused a want the system kept selling me, more, bigger, "make it grow", with something I genuinely needed. I didn't need it. And if it can happen to one person with a spreadsheet and a persuasive advisor, imagine it running an entire economy.

Because it is.

The economist Cédric Durand makes exactly this argument, at the scale of whole societies. In Comment bifurquer (co-written with Razmig Keucheyan, Zones, 2024), he points out that our economies are structured around profitability and markets rather than around needs. The system is very good at manufacturing desires and then selling them back to us as necessities. His provocation is not nostalgic. It is a design question: what would it mean to organise decisions around what we actually need, instead of around the reflex to accumulate more?

That question does not only belong to governments. It belongs to every organisation, and quietly, to every one of us.

Every organisation runs on a quiet assumption: that more is better. More revenue, more headcount, more features, more markets, more assets. Growth is not treated as one option among many. It is treated as the goal itself : the thing you pursue by default, the thing you never have to justify. And because it never has to be justified, it is almost never examined.

But growth is not a strategy. It is a symptom of not having chosen.

Most organisations optimise for expansion without ever having defined what they, or their market, actually need. The reflex replaces the reasoning. You add the product line because competitors have one. You expand into the region because the deck said "total addressable market." You hire because last quarter you hired. Each step feels rational on its own. Together they build a structure nobody deliberately designed and few people actually want to maintain. It is the corporate version of twelve apartments.

This is the heart of Durand's argument, and it is worth sitting with. A market economy does not simply meet needs. It produces desires, and then teaches us to experience those desires as lacks. The feeling of missing something is manufactured upstream, by people with an interest in your wanting it. At the level of a person, that is an unnecessary purchase. At the level of an organisation, it is capacity built for demand that does not exist, acquisitions made to look decisive, growth pursued because stopping feels like failing.

The tragedy is not that these are bad decisions. It is that they were never really decisions at all. No one asked what the underlying need was, so the want walked straight in wearing the costume.

Before your next big commitment, a product, a hire, an acquisition, an investment, run it through three questions. They are simple. They are also surprisingly hard to answer honestly.

1. What is this actually for? Name the underlying need this serves. Not the metric it moves : the need. If the only honest answer you can give is "growth," or "the market expects it," you have found a want wearing a need's costume. Real needs can be described without reference to size.

2. Who decided this was a need : us, or the system around us? Distinguish a genuine requirement from an inherited convention. A great deal of what we treat as necessary is simply what our sector does, a habit no one consciously chose. (Regular readers will recognise this: north is not up, and it never was.)

3. If resources were finite tomorrow, would this survive the cut? This is Durand's "government by needs," translated into a decision tool. Scarcity clarifies. When you imagine you cannot have everything, the difference between what you need and what you merely want stops being philosophical and becomes obvious.

The shift is from growth-by-default to needs-by-design. The strongest organisations of the next decade will not be the ones that grew the most. They will be the ones that knew, precisely, what they needed, and had the discipline to stop at enough.

Patagonia is the cleanest example of choosing on purpose. It has spent years telling customers to buy less, repairing rather than replacing, and deliberately capping the kind of growth that would dilute what the company is for. It defined its need : to stay in business as a force for the environmen, and refused the wants that did not serve it. It is still here, still profitable, precisely because it chose.

WeWork is the mirror image. It confused a want (relentless expansion, a valuation that flattered everyone involved) with a need, scaled far beyond anything the underlying business required, and discovered that growth built on no real need does not stabilise. It collapses. Nobody ever stopped to ask what the company was actually for. The apartments, so to speak, kept multiplying until the headache became terminal.

Growth is not the goal. It is what we chase when we have not decided what we are for. The most resilient organisations, and the most resilient people, will be the ones who can tell the difference between a need and an expensive want, and who have the courage to stop at enough. Durand asks the question at the scale of an economy. You can ask it on Monday morning, about the very next thing on your list.

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Three stories, one thread: across policy, business and finance, "more" is quietly losing its status as the automatic answer. The idea of enough, of designing around needs rather than volume, is moving from the margins to the mainstream.

For decades, climate policy was framed almost entirely around efficiency and clean supply : do the same, but greener. That is changing. The concept of sufficiency, meeting needs with less, rather than endlessly greening more, now appears explicitly in mainstream climate assessments and energy scenarios. When the institutions setting the agenda start writing "enough" into their frameworks, the reflex to grow first and ask questions later is no longer the only respectable position. It is a direct echo of Durand's question, arriving through the front door of official policy.

Source: IPCC, AR6, Working Group III, Chapter 5, “Demand, services and social aspects of mitigation.”

One of the quiet findings behind the sufficiency debate: decent living standards for everyone on Earth may require dramatically less energy than rich countries currently burn. The work of Joel Milward-Hopkins and colleagues models a scenario in which universal decent living is delivered on a fraction of today's global energy use. The point is not austerity. It is that the gap between what we consume and what we actually need is enormous, and most of that gap is want, not need. For any organisation, the same audit applies: how much of what you produce and consume is actually required?

Source: Millward-Hopkins et al. (2020), “Providing decent living with minimum energy: A global scenario,” Global Environmental Change, vol. 65.

The idea that a company might deliberately choose not to grow used to be heretical. It is becoming a strategy. A growing number of firms, from Patagonia's ownership restructuring to the "degrowth" and "post-growth" conversations now reaching business schools and management journals, are testing whether stable, needs-based businesses outperform expansion-at-all-costs over the long run. The signal to watch: when "we chose not to scale that" stops being an apology and starts being a competitive advantage.

Source: Harvard Business Review (2020), “Why ‘De-growth’ Shouldn’t Scare Businesses,” by Thomas Roulet & Joel Bothello.

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