I’ve been reading this interesting series of articles on Overcoming Bias about utopias, and how no book ever written about a utopia actually has a true utopia. They are always somehow flawed. The poster supposes that this is because good stories always need conflict, and so a true utopia would just a very dull and boring book. If someone wrote a book where everyone was happy all the time and always will be, would you read it?
I know I wouldn’t. I’d be bored out of my mind. OB has another series of posts about “complex novelty” and the evolutionary importance of boredom. It is advantageous as an individual and as a species for us to become bored with repetitive tasks, and to explore and learn new things. Now imagine if a true utopian society was somehow created, and we were all happy all the time. Do you think you would get bored? If so, then it isn’t a true utopia. But if not, I feel like we would be tricked somehow. Our brains would need to be altered to no longer seek solutions to problems that aren’t there any more.
The whole bit about how “If God is all-powerful, why is there suffering in the world?” being because “He wants to make us better/stronger people” always seemed hokey to me, but maybe there’s some truth to it. I honestly don’t think we’d know what do with ourselves if all our problems were solved. Probably vegetate, like in the Matrix. And I think we will always have conflict, at the very least until the problem of finite resources is solved (maybe even after that). And that is a huge hill to climb, since it would probably require reversing entropy to solve. Which is another story entirely.
It sounds like you’re creating problems yourself by trying to solve this issue instead of looking at why their is a problem in the first place.