A recent paper by Keysser, Steinberger, and Schmelzer summarized different theories about what motivates economic growth.

Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4zjEGI7DSo

This obsession with economic growth comes, as the paper shows, from various sources. They counted 21 such plausible sources.

1 Accumulation of money.

2 Income and wealth inequality.

3 Economic class and private property.

4 Market competition.

5 Monetary economy.

6 Advantages of firm size.

7 Cheap resources and energy.

8 For-profit firms and profit maximisation.

9 Sales effort.

10 Working time / Labour-saving technological change.

11 Financial market depreciation.

12 Private interest-bearing debt and money creation.

13 Consumerist culture.

14 Growthist ideology.

15 Neoliberal ideology and policy.

16 Power and domination.

17 The state, elites and geopolitics.

18 Welfare state financing.

19 Miscellaneous, such as when human needs grow faster than productivity.

20 Population structure.

21 Technology and infrastructure

These 21 general themes have 112 mechanisms that lead to economic growth dependencies and imperatives. For example, theme 3 economic class and private property has 12 such mechanisms related to how private property forces the economy to grow just to maintain its existence. If we apply a critical view to this summary, which comes from 248 publications, we may be tempted to say that the causal chain stops right here, with this list of 112 mechanisms under 21 themes.