Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you perceive as some weird religious thing is merely the rejection of the completely unfounded axiom that all logistic curves are exponentials if you want them to be. From the point of view of someone who has rejected this axiom, then the slavish devotion to growth looks like a bizarre cult where the worshippers feed more and more of the very finite resources needed for humans to flourish into a machine that doe…
What people don't seem to grasp is that the optimal growth path isn't the fastest one, it is the one that balances speed vs longevity. If you burn yourself out in the first 10 years of your career, your rate of growth might be impressive but your most productive years will barely even matter so your output will be low either way. What you want to do is reach the highest possible output and maintain it for as long as…
If we're talking about "growth" in the sense of adding up all production before civilization collapses (to infer from your statement about individual careers), I suppose there is a perspective that says this is a proxy for how advanced the civilization can be before it collapses.
I do think maximizing total output before collapse as the main important thing may result in strange conclusions. A person's productivity famously doesn't account for happiness and the joy of going for hikes or playing video games with friends, which most would argue matter more.
You could counter by suggesting that at a civilization scale maximizing total production is the best way to guess how far along we are and since we may have initial resource limitations we need to conserve things so that we have the highest chance of getting through pinch points where things are only extremely bad instead of civilization-ending.
It's a fair point, but if you are making a metaphor to a single career's productive output it seems to imply that you assume there must be an end. Yes, there is an end to infinite growth, obviously there must be. I do think we need to worry about how to live happy lives knowing that our civilization will very probably end or stagnate. To me I don't think "productivity" in any sense measurable by energy necessarily makes me happier. Sometimes it does, but sometimes sometimes it makes me happier to not maximize my productivity.