This is one of the great achievements of humankind, and while we have much more to do, it's good to recognize the progress we've made.

And while I'm also skeptical about the amount of resources organizations use to maintain themselves, any organization or organism or community that does not have a primary goal of keeping itself alive will in short order cease to exist. If you think your organization has a long-term beneficial purpose, you better design it to be self-sustaining, and with a large margin of safety.

> hedonic adaptation pretty much guarantees that no matter what our position we will always want more

There's an Indian holy man, now deceased, who said we need to learn to practice "ceiling on desires". It may be that only the expression of our higher values can clear this logjam?

> so how this could happen without damage to the environment

One thought that occurs to me is if we could create a kind of split-level economy. There would be a real-world ecologically-informed economy that met basic needs as efficiently as possible. On top of that substrate we would have a computer-mediated virtual economy where there were no (or very few) effective limits on hedonistic adaptation (or status-symbol seeking, or whatever). It seems like we're seeing something like that emerge "naturally" anyway, eh? NFT & "crypto", in-game purchases, whatever FB's metaverse becomes, etc.

Eventually, people might submit voluntarily to enter "the Matrix": your physical body kept perfectly safe, and the only limits are your imagination? Not my cup of tea, but not insane on the face of it, eh?