There are a group of people constantly robbing everyone of their money. If the world stopped growing, the people being robbed would notice they are suddenly getting poorer. Instead if they are robbed such that the rate at which they are being robbed is slightly less than the growth rate of the world, they will not notice the robbery taking place since their standard of living will go sideways and slightly up on the net (though in reality, due to many complex factors, the actual lived experience may in many practical ways deteriorate even while they can purchase more every year).

I have a website, https://civilizationmetrics.org that shows the actual growth, much to the chagrin of bitcoiners who fail to understand bitcoin without facile memes, but it is currently down since I'm dealing with migrating from google domains to cloudfare and having some issues with that.