The sunlit uplands

Life on the plateau

William Henry Holmes, In the Plateau Country, Colorado, 1931. Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The other day, I glanced at my Substack numbers. Number of views: similar for most recent posts. Number of subscribers: growing slowly. Typical number of likes or comments: steady. “Oh,” I found myself thinking, almost as a reflex. “I’ve hit a plateau.”

Don’t worry, this isn’t a post about Substack growth (or lack of it).

Even in the meagre terms of my own writing life, my numbers on Substack are of limited concern to me and none at all to anyone else. I’m sure I could have found some other example from my life to illustrate the point.

What actually interested me was what immediately followed as a counter-thought: “What’s so bad about a plateau?”

Used as a noun, a plateau is “a usually extensive land area having a relatively level surface raised sharply above adjacent land on at least one side or a region of little or no change in a graphic representation”. That feels neutral enough.

But as a verb, plateau means to “stop developing or increasing, especially after a period of rapid growth”.

This definition of the verb suggests I should worry about plateauing. But why is plateauing considered a negative?

Maybe it’s because we’re so preoccupied with growth.

Of course, living things grow, and some animals never stop growing physically, such as lobsters. They’re like the fish that kept growing in a story I enjoyed as a child. ¹

But most animals stop growing at some point, and humans even start to shrink when they get older. This makes me wonder if constant, incessant growth is really necessary (or even possible) in other aspects of our lives.

Yet it’s a pervasive notion in many human-focused disciplines.

Studying history at school, I came across the notion of “Whig history”, one of steady, often teleological progress (growth). Was that how our lives were to be, too?

And the idea that growth is supposed to continue forever seems now built into most thinking about economics, even though it’s a relatively new idea. ²