More and more of us want to slow down.
To consume less. To live differently. To reduce our footprint. To recover time, measure, sobriety, connection, silence and breathing space. This desire is no longer marginal. It now crosses every layer of society. It is driven by ecological anxiety, psychological exhaustion, the rejection of a world saturated with objects, flows and consumer injunctions — but also by a sincere aspiration to a more balanced life.
And yet, at the global scale, almost nothing seems to change.
Emissions keep rising. Resources keep being depleted. Ecosystems keep deteriorating. Rhythms keep accelerating. Productive pressure intensifies. Public and private debts keep growing. The infrastructures of consumption, transport, finance and extraction continue to push the world economy in the same direction.
As if, despite our intentions, a deeper force were still dragging us the other way.
This gap is disturbing.
It produces guilt, often frustration, and sometimes a form of resignation. Many end up wondering whether they are not doing enough. Not sober enough. Not coherent enough. Not activist enough. Not radical enough. Not exemplary enough.
But one question deserves to be asked, without judgment: what if the problem did not come only from us?
What if, despite our willingness to slow down, we were trapped in a system that is structurally unable to do so?
Just because the fish wants to leave the bowl does not mean the bowl will let it out.
Moral brakes are not enough when the vehicle is built to accelerate
Degrowth is often presented as a moral and cultural issue. We are told that we must change our imaginaries, our desires, our habits, and our representations of happiness, success, comfort and progress.
That is true.
There is indeed a cultural battle to be fought. We must deconstruct the idolatry of growth, the obsession with purchasing power, the confusion between wealth and accumulation, between freedom and consumption, between material comfort and human fulfilment.
But this cultural battle is not enough.
Choosing degrowth cannot be merely an individual moral posture. It requires a transformation of the structures in which our economic lives are locked.
Because it is not enough for the foot to want to press the brake if the car will not slow down — because its only pedal is an accelerator.
Degrowth cannot rest solely on individual ethics, inner conversion, voluntary sobriety or the multiplication of good intentions. These dimensions are necessary, but they become powerless when they collide with economic structures that permanently require expansion, profitability, solvency, rising incomes, expanding markets and growing monetary flows.
The blockage is therefore not only moral or cultural.
It is structural.
More precisely, it lies at the heart of our monetary, banking and financial system.
Money is not the problem. Its architecture is.
At this point, some will say: let us invent a world without money.
Hmmm…
Money is not necessarily the problem. It is a social institution, a collective language, an instrument of measurement, exchange, coordination and projection into the future. A complex society can hardly do entirely without a tool that helps organize debts, commitments, contributions, exchanges and collective priorities.
The problem is not money as such.
The problem is the monetary system — the architecture of its plumbing.
Who creates money? Under what conditions? To finance what? According to which criteria? With what repayment obligations? With what effects on growth, debt, competition, investment, interest rates, productive pressure and the destruction of the living world?
The system we live in today is only one historical configuration among others. It is not eternal. It is not natural. It is not unsurpassable.
And it is certainly not the most appropriate one for preserving the conditions of life on Earth.
In contemporary economies, money is largely created through bank credit, and therefore through debt. This means that the economy must constantly produce future income flows to repay past commitments. In other words, it must generate enough growth, profit, taxation, consumption and market activity to maintain the general solvency of the system.
Growth is therefore not only an ideology.
It is also an operating constraint.
We may want to slow down. We may want to consume less. We may dream of a sober society. But as long as monetary architecture requires the continuous expansion of economic flows in order to stabilize debts, balance sheets, incomes, pensions, profits and public budgets, degrowth will remain an aspiration trapped inside an engine designed to accelerate.
Degrowth alone is not enough
It would be absurd to believe that we can keep increasing material extraction, energy consumption, extractive infrastructures, logistical flows and production volumes indefinitely in a finite world. Some activities will have to be reduced. Some sectors will have to slow down. Some forms of production will have to be abandoned. Some forms of material contraction will have to be organized.
But degrowth alone is not enough.
A society cannot merely shrink. It must also hold together. It must reorganize itself. It must protect the most vulnerable. It must finance useful infrastructures. It must regenerate soils, forests, water tables, living territories, public services, commons, communities and social bonds.
We do not only need an economy capable of producing less.
We need an economy capable of becoming more resilient and robust.
Robustness is not performance. It is not optimization. It is not the maximization of yield. It is the capacity of a system to absorb shocks, preserve its vital functions, maintain social cohesion, limit vulnerabilities and restore its living environments.
An economy of robustness must be able to organize two movements at the same time:
- the degrowth of destructive, useless or degenerative activities;
- the strengthening of regenerative, social, reparative and protective activities.
In other words, it is not enough to say “less”. We must also say “better”, “otherwise”, “more solid”, “more resilient”, “more alive”.
We need an economy capable of organizing not only degrowth, but also ecological and social resilience.
The great blind spot: who finances regeneration?
This is where the monetary question becomes central again.
Regenerative dynamics are often slow, diffuse, territorial and collective. They do not always produce a rapid financial return. Restoring soil, repairing a watershed, relocalizing essential activities, strengthening a community, preserving a forest, supporting energy sobriety, caring for the elderly, educating, preventing, maintaining, repairing: all this creates real value, but not always immediate market profitability.
Yet our financial system is very poor at financing what does not monetize quickly.
What does not generate measurable, rapid and appropriable returns is marginalized, underfunded or ignored. Regenerative activities often escape conventional logics of return on investment. They create common, systemic, diffuse, long-term benefits. They improve the quality of the world, but they do not fit easily into the boxes of conventional finance.
This is where a major contradiction lies.
We call for degrowth, but we continue to operate within a financial system designed to allocate capital toward what grows, intensifies, accelerates, privatizes and monetizes quickly.
We want to slow down, but our financial instruments reward acceleration.
We want to repair, but our balance sheets favor extraction.
We want to protect the commons, but our accounting first values what can become a commodity.
We want to reduce our material footprint, but our monetary system depends on the growth of income flows.
Under these conditions, degrowth becomes not only difficult, but structurally incoherent.
We need finance capable of supporting the exit from extractive finance
This is why it is not enough to oppose degrowth to growth. We must change the question.
The real question is: what economic architecture can reduce what destroys while financing what regenerates?
In other words: how can we organize a selective contraction of degenerative activities without causing social collapse? How can we finance low-impact activities, commons, essential services, ecological repair and collective robustness, even when these activities do not match the conventional criteria of profitability?
This requires a profound rethinking of the monetary, banking and financial system.
Not to abolish all money.
Not to fantasize about a return to a primitive economy.
But to recognize that the current plumbing channels flows in the wrong direction.
A genuinely ecological economy cannot simply moralize behavior. It must transform financing circuits, monetary allocation criteria, structural incentives, mechanisms of money creation and destruction, the purposes of investment, and the way a society defines what deserves to be supported.
Degrowth needs a regenerative model
Thinking degrowth without also thinking a regenerative model capable of supporting it is an illusion.
Unorganized degrowth can become socially brutal. It can produce unemployment, precarity, resentment, political conflict and democratic regression. A society can accept slowing down only if it feels protected, secured, accompanied and oriented toward a desirable form of stability and dignity.
Degrowth must therefore not be understood as a mere quantitative reduction.
It must be articulated with an economy of robustness.
That means:
- reducing destructive flows;
- protecting basic needs;
- financing regenerative activities;
- strengthening the commons;
- stabilizing societies;
- deleveraging what must be deleveraged;
- redirecting money toward the living world.
Without this, degrowth will remain trapped in a contradiction: it will seek to slow down within a system that only knows how to survive by accelerating.
Moral, cultural — but above all structural
Yes, the problem is moral.
We must leave behind the imaginary of predation, waste, accumulation and endless more. We must learn to desire something other than infinite material expansion. We must redefine success, wealth, freedom, security, comfort and power.
Yes, the problem is cultural.
We must build new narratives, new symbols, new forms of prestige, recognition, belonging and gratification. We must make sobriety desirable — not as punishment, but as civilizational maturity.
But the problem is also — and perhaps above all — structural.
No culture of sobriety can take hold for long in an economic architecture that punishes contraction, rewards extraction, requires growth and underfunds regeneration.
The fish may want to leave the bowl.
The bowl must still be opened.
And if we truly want to open the bowl, we must dare to look where a decisive part of the confinement takes place: in our monetary, banking and financial system.
That is one of the major blind spots in the debate on degrowth.
And it is precisely this blind spot that Debunk’Onomy intends to place at the center: to think together degrowth, resilience and the monetary architecture capable of making them possible.