Alternatively, I would suggest philosophers have been arguing about what "optimal" means here for millennia. We keep learning more about the effect of our actio

Alternatively, I would suggest philosophers have been arguing about what "optimal" means here for millennia. We keep learning more about the effect of our actions on the ecosystem and our own health, so I hope we are doing better over time. If we're talking about "growth" in the sense of adding up all production before civilization collapses (to infer from your statement about individual careers), I suppose there is a perspective that says this is a proxy for how advanced the civilization can be before it collapses. I do think maximizing total output before collapse as the main important thing may result in strange conclusions. A person's productivity famously doesn't account for happiness and the joy of going for hikes or playing video games with friends, which most would argue matter more. You could counter by suggesting that at a civilization scale maximizing total production is the best way to guess how far along we are and since we may have initial resource limitations we need to conserve things so that we have the highest chance of getting through pinch points where things are only extremely bad instead of civilization-ending. It's a fair point, but if you are making a metaphor to a single career's productive output it seems to imply that you assume there must be an end. Yes, there is an end to infinite growth, obviously there must be. I do think we need to worry about how to live happy lives knowing that our civilization will very probably end or stagnate. To me I don't think "productivity" in any sense measurable by energy necessarily makes me happier. Sometimes it does, but sometimes sometimes it makes me happier to not maximize my productivity.