This piece builds on the themes of “Beyond Growth: The Unavoidable Reality of Nature’s Limits”.

It explores how localism offers a natural path forward as the industrial economy reaches its limits of complexity, cost, and energy use. The argument here is simple: when money, time, and energy are seen together, the localist system emerges not as a retreat from modernity, but as its practical successor — leaner, slower, and more human.

We’ve grown used to measuring everything in money. Governments talk about GDP, companies talk about profit, and even charities measure their “impact” in pounds. But few of us stop to ask a simpler question: how are we actually spending our time, and how much energy does it take to keep our modern way of life going?

If we look at those two things — time and energy — the story of the industrial economy begins to look rather odd.

The time drain in your pocket
Take your smartphone. It’s a wonderful tool, but also a thief of hours. The average adult in Britain now spends about four hours a day staring at one. Some of that time is useful — arranging a delivery, checking the weather, or messaging a friend. But most of it isn’t.

Scrolling through news feeds, watching short videos, chasing adverts, re-entering passwords: this is busy work, not productive work. It feels active, but it rarely produces anything of value.

If you add it up, that’s more than 1,000 hours a year — almost half a working year — spent in digital drift. Imagine what that same time could do in the real world: repairing a fence, helping a neighbour, or tending a garden.

The rise of the one-time password
It’s getting worse, not better. Have you noticed how many times a day you now have to “prove” who you are?

One-time passwords, security codes, captchas, and two-step verification now clutter almost every online interaction.

Each one takes only a few seconds, but across millions of people and thousands of logins a day, it adds up to an invisible national time tax. It’s the cost of living in a complex, centralised system that no one fully trusts.

These checks don’t grow food, fix shoes, or care for the elderly. They simply maintain the machinery of complexity.  The industrial economy, which once promised efficiency, now devotes an increasing share of our collective time to protecting itself from itself.

The hidden electricity bill
Phones themselves don’t use much power — perhaps a few kilowatt-hours a year, costing less than a cup of coffee. The trouble lies in the system that supports them.

Every text, photo, and video passes through mobile masts, fibre networks, and giant data centres that run 24 hours a day. For every unit of electricity used to charge your phone, thirty to fifty units are burned somewhere else to keep the network alive.

When you multiply that by 50 million UK users, the total is about five terawatt-hours a year — roughly 1½ per cent of all the electricity Britain uses. That’s equivalent to a small power station running flat out just to support our smartphone habits.

And most of that energy isn’t producing anything tangible. It’s pushing adverts, holding temporary data, and waiting for the next scroll.

The industrial model: high output, low efficiency
The modern industrial economy runs on this kind of hidden overhead. Every product or service depends on huge networks of energy, information, and security. The system looks efficient when you measure it in pounds per hour, but not when you measure it in human hours or kilowatt-hours.

For every hour of true production, several more are spent on administration, verification, and digital upkeep.

The localist alternative
Now imagine a more grounded way of working — the localist economy.

Here, people make, grow, repair, and care directly. They use simple digital tools when needed but don’t live through them. Work is personal, trust is local, and value is measured by usefulness, not by the number of clicks.

A local baker sells to nearby families. A handyman repairs what’s already there. A neighbour shares surplus fruit rather than advertising it online. Electricity might come from rooftop panels, a village turbine, or a community battery. Transactions are trusted, so no one wastes time proving their identity three times a day.

Time is used directly, and energy travels short distances.

Why localism becomes competitive
At first glance, this might seem nostalgic or even inefficient — until you remember that national electricity and digital overheads are now very expensive.

Industrial firms are locked into the national grid, long supply chains, and heavy data use. Their costs rise with every energy price increase and every new security regulation.

Local producers, by contrast, can use their own power and keep things simple. They don’t need to heat giant buildings or refrigerate goods for long journeys. They don’t run constant advertising campaigns or manage digital payment systems. They just work and trade.

So as national energy prices climb, local producers quietly become more competitive.

Time efficiency versus financial efficiency

It’s worth separating two kinds of efficiency.

The industrial world is efficient with money but wasteful of time.
The localist world is modest with money but careful with time.

In human terms, the second is often more productive. A person who spends their day doing useful, tangible things — even unpaid — contributes more to life than someone trapped in administrative loops or digital distraction.

The phone, used properly
This doesn’t mean we should throw our phones away. They’re marvellous for the right tasks: sharing knowledge, finding tools, checking weather patterns, or contacting customers. The problem is overuse. The aim is to put the phone back in its proper place — as a servant, not a master.

If average daily use fell from four hours to half an hour, the nation would save tens of billions of human hours each year and several terawatt-hours of electricity. That’s a lot of freed capacity — both mental and electrical — for things that actually matter.

The wider picture
When energy and digital costs rise faster than wages fall, simplicity wins.
Localism’s strength lies in this simplicity: short distances, direct trust, human time, and small power sources close to where people live.

The industrial economy will still exist for some large-scale or specialist tasks, but its cost base will keep rising as it feeds its own complexity. The localist economy, lighter and slower, will quietly outcompete it in many everyday activities — not through subsidies or slogans, but through basic physics and human sense.

A quiet revolution
The recovery of productive time and local energy isn’t a step backwards. It’s a return to proportion.

As people spend less time proving who they are and more time being who they are, life will feel less hurried and more useful.

That may turn out to be the real measure of prosperity in the years ahead — not how much money changes hands, but how wisely we spend our limited time and energy.