I watched him walk out the door carrying a piece of my neck towards the lab where he would inspect me, layer by layer. He’d look for rough edges, for how far the cells had traveled. He looked for good news. Cancer had persuaded my skin to grow in ways that no longer made sense. Cancer doesn’t have ambition. It has no vision. No mission statement, no lodestar guiding a noble path. It just grows.
It was basal cell carcinoma. My doctor called it the best kind of cancer you can have; a phrase that is both genuinely reassuring and completely absurd. I dodged a bullet and know it. But given my history, I suspect I’ll be back in this chair again.
There are few things that evoke philosophical introspection more than the buzzing fluorescent bulbs of a sterile procedure room. Waiting for the lab work, I found parallels in other things that grow without reason. It isn’t just cells that can lose track of the plot.
Capitalism has forgotten its purpose. Startups are told to blitz to scale first and find purpose later (or never). Grow the user base, capture market share, dominate the ecosystem. The metrics metastasize.
Established companies aren’t immune. Google once posted a simple constraint on its ambitions: Don’t be evil. When the company restructured as Alphabet, that line was quietly retired and replaced: Do the right thing. For whom? The revision was first announced in a Wall Street filing. That tells you everything about what “the right thing” was in service of.
Growth is natural, the argument goes. Cells divide. Organisms expand. Markets follow the same logic as life itself. And the argument has teeth. Growth built the supply chains that put medication in rural hospitals. Growth compounded across decades into agricultural gains that mean we can feed more people with less ground. The GDP growth of emerging economies has pulled more people out of poverty than any aid program in history. If you are going to call growth a disease, you have to reckon with what it cured.
But look closer. None of those wins came from growth that was chasing itself. They came from growth that was pointed and purposeful. It was intentional actions aimed at efficiency, at access, at survival. The growth had a direction. It knew what it was for. What we have built instead is a system that treats the direction as optional and the growth as the point. A business that grows in order to serve more people is doing something categorically different from a business that serves people in order to grow. The order of operations matters. Reverse it and you haven’t changed the rate of growth. You’ve changed what the growth is eating.
Nature is not a moral alibi. The fact that something can happen doesn’t mean it should.
Think about the last platform you loved that you no longer trust. Maybe it was a social network that once felt like a town square and now feels like a casino. Maybe it was a search engine that used to find things. Maybe it was a streaming service that, for one brief moment, felt like it was built for you. Something changed. The product didn’t fail. It was redirected. You stopped being the customer and became the resource. The original purpose got subordinated to the quarterly number. The tumor grew. The host deteriorated.
We treat “static” as a synonym for death. We are told that if a company isn’t growing, it’s rotting. But biology tells a different story. An oak tree spends its youth in a frantic vertical reach for the sun. But eventually it stops growing upward. It deepens its roots. It thickens its bark. It bears fruit. By every measure that matters it is doing exactly what it is supposed to do, without adding a single inch to its height. We do not call this failure.
A business that pays its people well, serves its customers with integrity, and remains profitable without needing to colonize every adjacent market isn’t a failure. It is a healthy, functioning part of an ecosystem. We have built an economy that treats this as a disappointment and the tumor as a success story. The metrics don’t distinguish between the two. They just measure growth.
The surgeon returned with the results. He had cleared the margins. He cut away the cells that had forgotten how to stop, leaving behind the tissue that still knew its purpose. The health of my skin depended entirely on what he was willing to throw away.
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