it seems … boring. I strongly value overcoming difficult challenges and having a positive impact on my fellow humans. This makes me uninterested in an easy, static, always-equally-pleasant existence.
I agree that a good world must have challenges and ways to positively impact others. (And I’d guess that OP does too and plans to address that later in this series.) However those challenges do NOT need to include many of the awful ones we face today. For example, while I hope that folks fighting malaria today are able to derive some pleasure from the challenge and the positive impact they’re having, I much more strongly hope that every one of them would push a button to eradicate malaria if such a button appeared, even though that source of challenge/impact-pleasure would thereby be destroyed. The main thing OP seems to be saying is that he’d press a large number of these buttons (for diseases, resource-shortages, etc); we can disagree on the precise point at which one should stop pressing buttons, but the overall idea seems sound. And if OP’s later posts do not convince you that such a world could still have plenty of challenge/impact sources, ping me and I will go track down a handful of my favorite stories which explore such a setting.
I agree that a good world must have challenges and ways to positively impact others. (And I’d guess that OP does too and plans to address that later in this series.) However those challenges do NOT need to include many of the awful ones we face today. For example, while I hope that folks fighting malaria today are able to derive some pleasure from the challenge and the positive impact they’re having, I much more strongly hope that every one of them would push a button to eradicate malaria if such a button appeared, even though that source of challenge/impact-pleasure would thereby be destroyed. The main thing OP seems to be saying is that he’d press a large number of these buttons (for diseases, resource-shortages, etc); we can disagree on the precise point at which one should stop pressing buttons, but the overall idea seems sound. And if OP’s later posts do not convince you that such a world could still have plenty of challenge/impact sources, ping me and I will go track down a handful of my favorite stories which explore such a setting.