If you buy food and eat it, you have personally used it, perhaps enjoyed it, and consumed it. All the effort, materials etc. that went into making the food and

If you buy food and eat it, you have personally used it, perhaps enjoyed it, and consumed it. All the effort, materials etc. that went into making the food and getting it to you - have been 'used up', by you. Now, insofar as the goal of the economy is people's enjoyment of stuff, it served its goal, which is great. But don't think that by consuming the food you did everyone else (the economy) any good - you didn't. You personally benefitted, which is great, and used up the resources - people's time and effort as well as materials that went into it. A better illustration would be you commissioning a yacht for yourself, using it recklessly and sinking it (with its value going to 0 - i.e. you consuming all of the value). How did the economy benefit? Engineers that could have worked on better problems, e.g. automating labour, instead spent their time on your yacht. So did workers. So did all the people to procure the materials. And now all of that is at the bottom of the ocean, benefitting nobody. But you had your fun while consuming this product. GDP is a lousy measure of a success of an economy. The point of an economy is to serve the needs of the people - sometimes it seems that some people believe it is the other way round, and people exist to 'grow the GDP'. If people are happy with consuming less, they can work less - what's so bad about that? Or they can invest instead of consuming - that is, work hard now so that they can work less in the future (or have more/better stuff). It is the investment, production and innovation that grows the economy in a meaningful sense (or getting access to cheaper labour, which does not seem very ethical). Encouraging consumption under the guise of benefitting the economy is absurd.