I just noticed you do some gardening.

Take a single plant, look what it does before it forms leaves, it pulls energy up from Earth as nutrients until it forms leaves. Then after the leaves form, the energy flows from the sun through the leaves of the plant, to flow as nutrients to Earth. This is how the Earth gets the energy paid back thousands of times over, that the plant took out as a kind of overdraft, until it formed leaves.

The plant always pays more back to Earth than Earth put into it.

Until now we always took more from Earth than we put into it.

But now we just formed leaves.

Does the plant stop growing after it forms leaves? Should the plant stop growing, just as it forms leaves?

Why would we not do what the plant does, with money being our human equivalent of nutrients?

This is the way I see it.

We'll stop growing one day, but its a long way off yet, and actually it would be a very big problem for the planet, if we stopped now, after all the energy we took out, never paying it back.