Dividends, which is what you are talking about, have not been paid in years.
Dividends are alive and well where I live. I haven't looked at the US market in a while but I thought it was only the tech stocks that weren't paying dividends.
Without dividends, all that is of interest to investors is the stock price increasing, and for that to happen, the company must report increases and logarithmic growth year after year, which is unsustainable in the long or even medium term.
Without dividends, the earnings simply stay in the company itself instead of being paid to you. They don't vanish. Look at it this way... image the company doesn't pay them to you but instead puts them in a company bank account. The price of the stock must rise because the assets on the books are now higher than last year and, as a stockholder, you own a portion of those assets. You make it sound like the earnings will cease to exist if they aren't paid as dividends. But they still do exit. They're just in the company (which you own) instead of in your bank account (which you own). And if you trust the company enough to buy their stock in the first place, then you probably aren't going to mind if they hold on to your dividends. This simplifies your taxes and allows them to use the money when opportunities arise to make the company still stronger and further increase the company value.
Devon