Maybe you already have withered.. how would you know? What do you compare with, what do you aspire to? "Adapting and growing" for the sake of... adapting and growing? What kind of life is that? What kind of world do we get when people who live their life like that build it? How about let's not, how about aiming slightly higher than merely being mould?

> The salvation of the world depends only on the individual whose world it is. At least, every individual must act as if the whole future of the world, of humanity itself, depends on him. Anything less is a shirking of responsibility and is itself a dehumanizing force, for anything less encourages the individual to look upon himself as a mere actor in a drama written by anonymous agents, as less than a whole person, and that is the beginning of passivity and aimlessness.

-- Joseph Weizenbaum

> Hobbes was the true, though never fully recognized, philosopher of the bourgeoisie because he realized that acquisition of wealth conceived as a never-ending process can be guaranteed only by the seizure of political power, for the accumulating process must sooner or later force open all existing territorial limits. He foresaw that a society which had entered the path of never-ending acquisition had to engineer a dynamic political organization capable of a corresponding never-ending process of power generation. He even, through sheer force of imagination, was able to outline the main psychological traits of the new type of man who would fit into such a society and its tyrannical body politic. He foresaw the necessary idolatry of power itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to surrender all his natural forces, his virtues and his vices, and would make him the poor meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against tyranny, and who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing government and does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent victim to an incomprehensible raison d'etat.

> For a Commonwealth based on the accumulated and monopolized power of all its individual members necessarily leaves each person powerless, deprived of his natural and human capacities. It leaves him degraded into a cog in the power-accumulating machine, free to console himself with sublime thoughts about the ultimate destiny of this machine, which itself is constructed in such a way that it can devour the globe simply by following its own inherent law.

-- Hannah Arendt

> Once upon a time there was a happy time when people could choose freely; 'Better dead than slave', dying standing rather than living on their knees. Once upon a time there was a wicked time when intellectuals who had become idiots declared that life was the highest of goods. The terrible time has come today, in which it is proved every day that death begins its reign of terror precisely when life has become the supreme good; that he who prefers to live on his knees, dies on his knees; that no one is easier to murder than a slave. We the living have to learn that you cannot even live on our knees, that you do not become immortal by chasing after life, and that if you no longer want to die for anything, you die even though you haven't done anything.

-- Hannah Arendt

> If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

-- Stephen Hawking

Allow for the possibility that you are not smarter than these people, but are simply rationalizing your own lack of courage. And if you think just "adapting" to this game of musical chairs makes you safe, you're wrong.