Energy and resources are force multipliers for that human, so making more energy available increases what someone can do.
There is also an organisational aspect in there: A better organized group can do more with resources and reach more resources for the same amount of human time. A human's time is more valuable if the human has a more centralized location an an organisation.
I look at psychologists, hookers, priests as people who sell basically their attention for emotional needs. Not much energy or resources in those transactions, but very lucrative. At the other end of the spectrum is the sun, dumping tons of energy on us, mostly worthless until humans organize the power.
More people than before getting a car inherently requires an increase in consumption of energy and resources as car manufacturing needs to grow; but more people getting access to a Netflix series does not; if people use larger cars then it requires an increase in consumption of energy and resources, but iPhone 12 mini is much better than the original first iPhone and meets more needs while requiring about the same energy and resources.
With a product like Netflix, is that the result of greater productivity? Did Netflix invent some kind of new food that meant humans who made the films or created the website could work twenty hour days for the same wage? The innovation was cutting out other parts of the distribution chain, not more efficient energy usage.
It isn't about more stuff either but more inputs. And there has been a significant increase in energy capture (I was talking about a far larger timescale, but this is over the 20th century) but there has been a larger increase in inputs (and a small increase in efficiency, although one that continues to compound), that is why climate change is occurring. Intangibles are neither here nor there because humans still expend calories (real solar energy) to produce those intangibles.
To say this another way, the value of an intangible product is (usually) closely related to the productivity of other parts of the economy. A film in Mauritanian street market is not worth as much a film on the Apple Store in the US. That elides the point that growth either comes from growth in inputs, or growth in efficiency of input usage (the increase in energy capture is, I think, efficiency...but it is usually not what people are thinking of when they think about efficiency).
The IUD in my gf says otherwise. What forms of population control did you have in mind? (And where are you in the queue?)
That being said, it is equally true that very few people who study economics actually ask basic questions about how and why economic growth occurs. Economic growth is just energy consumption. That is it (whether humans burning food or oil or gas or whatever, the industrial revolution was about unlocking energy for production...note, this plays no role in Solow growth). And if you build a system which is unable to improve efficiency than that process is logically finite (but, as in paragraph one, no-one knows how finite...you can do all the computer simulations you want, no-one knows...a good example of this is shale oil, Russia has unfathomably large resources of shale oil...everyone knew it was there but it didn't matter until fracking, peak oil was a mania).
So I don't think anyone is really asking the right questions. It is really simple: do we want free energy? Do we want to improve the efficiency of our energy use? Even if climate change wasn't happening, we would need to look at solar/wind/whatever (and, hopefully, this will lead to a new industrial revolution). Imo, population control is also important. We can improve energy use but population will just grow to fill the space (and part of the problem is here actually poor quality elder care and weak pension systems caused by low savings rates). Obv, population control isn't popular anymore but...it makes sense once you understand economic growth.