I certainly don't understand macroeconomics very well, but I'm inherently suspicious of a system that demands exponential growth, ie unless the GDP grows every

I certainly don't understand macroeconomics very well, but I'm inherently suspicious of a system that demands exponential growth, ie unless the GDP grows every year, people start predicting ruin. If this implies that the system is unable to stably exist in a static scenario, it seems to me that there is some sort of perpetual borrowing from the future to sustain the present going on, and that reminds me of a another system that only functions during exponential growth: a pyramid scheme. Can someone more knowledgeable comment on this?