from your words I assume that you do not agree that scaling down is needed, neither morally nor environmentally...

That is not what Colman said.

What he said is that the politics of the left need to survive in the current media environment and need to satisfy the expectations of the politicians about their own personal position.

Which makes "degrowth" a hard sell to the public and a hard bullet to bite for the politicians who would push it.

Which has nothing to do with the necessity or morality of scaling down, just with its political expediency.

Economics is politics by other means

What is missing from many people's lives is a sense of completion, and the celebration of completion. I've worked all my life on creative projects that at some point are 'finished'. The blood sweat and tears are there in the end product - there is a positive, visible result to creative effort. It is an enormous satisfaction and one I've always felt privileged to enjoy.

Of course it's not confined to the 'creative industries': I was driving round Helsinki with a builder once and he was proud to point out all the building projects he'd worked on - and he was a plasterer. There are lots of examples of the pride that people have in what they do, but for many also there is no end result, no completion, no celebration. The job goes on from year to year, and there is little sense of progress or achievement - little sense of "I helped do that". There is little 'dignity' in doing such work without end.

The frustrations of playing computer games come from a computer's indefatigability - it never ends, it never gives up: it's you against the machine, and, ultimately, you are going to lose.

You can't be me, I'm taken

So, I suppose you agree that all humans should have access to the same living standard?

Yes.

So, we give them the average living standard than average Europeans enjoy

Grief no. Rather better than that if we can manage it.

(from your words I assume that you do not agree that scaling down is needed, neither morally nor environmentally...)

I have no idea what you mean by "morally" here: it appears to be a misanthropic judgement on how other people live.

The question of resource constraints is another matter. To a first approximation it seems that a standard of living more-or-less equivalent to mine (probably not with horses though) isn't unreasonable. We drive one small car (which we'd rather not, really) we travel a little, not a lot, we use public transport when possible, we have a modest house, eat well, buy nice things but not a lot of them. Various calculators claim that if everyone were like us we'd need about double the resources we have.

Here's the thing: the system we live in is terribly wasteful in ways I can't fix directly. It takes huge amounts of water to provide us with our tap water because of underinvestment in infrastructure. We drive more than we would like to because the public transport is inadequate. Our carbon footprint is large because fossil fuel power generation was the expedient choice for decades. Efficiency and changing our practices would probably account for half our footprint. The details would change, I suppose, but the standard of living wouldn't drop.

3 billion cars (and the oil to go with it, plus the metals), Ipads, Playstation 3, flight vacations, ...

None of which is an obvious problem if we weren't grossly wasteful.

I suggest that maintaining the current standard of living is neither possible NOR desirable.

Whatever about possibility, you'll find that 95% of people disagree on the desirability.

I remember playing checkers with my grandfather when I was a kid. I now have a Wii. Interestingly I derived more pleasure from playing checkers.

You're playing the Wii with the wrong people then. And confusing tools with experiences.

And what about learning a simple musical instrument instead of listening to the latest fad (mainstream or alternative)? Play it to your neighbours. Play it to yourself. In case of simple instruments you can even learn to build it yourself.

Romantic nonsense.

A completely different view of the world. On what fullfills life.

Go tell that to the rest of the world. They don't want your view of the world, which is the point.

Less Prozac.

Arguable. It always seems to me that the utopias of the puritan anti-technologists are places I'd hate to live. If they'd even suffer my existence.

Anyway, I've heard this speech before.

The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit - a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live. With the tidings that make such an Ireland possible, St. Patrick came to our ancestors fifteen hundred years ago promising happiness here no less than happiness hereafter. It was the pursuit of such an Ireland that later made our country worthy to be called the island of saints and scholars. It was the idea of such an Ireland - happy, vigorous, spiritual - that fired the imagination of our poets; that made successive generations of patriotic men give their lives to win religious and political liberty; and that will urge men in our own and future generations to die, if need be, so that these liberties may be preserved.

A land of enforced conformity, of subservience to all authority, of hidden abuses and of massive inequality is what we got. Excuse my cynicism.