"For the question is not 'How interesting is a utopia to look at?' but rather 'How good is it to live in?'"

Language model depicts "struggle" abstractly

"For the question is not 'How interesting is a utopia to look at?' but rather 'How good is it to live in?'" -- Bostrom, Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World

It seems to be commonly agreed upon that 12 hours of work a day is too much and 0 hours is too few. But how did our intuitions converge on the exact right number, with anything less than that likely to produce troublemakers, slackers, and the dissatisfied? And anything more leading to exhausted and burnt-out people without time for the other activities that nurture their souls?

Our intuitions repeat in regard to other scenarios-- worlds where people lose children, are malnourished, live through war or famine are deemed, justifiably, very bad. But worlds, seen primarily through fiction and thought experiment, where every need is met before the request can even be made, where there is no poverty and no violence -- are often also deemed dispreferred on the grounds that they would be stultifying or boring, the belief is that we need the challenge and variety Struggle creates. 

But if we succeed in producing very powerful AI systems that are able to solve many of the world's persistent problems, making us much wealthier and healthier, and perhaps eliminating the need to work, then we will be in a world with much less struggle.

One common reaction to this is that it will lead to a less meaningful life; that without struggle some essential form of human striving will have been lost. I find that argument somewhat appealing, but I'm also curious who decides what the exact optimal amount of struggle is, and for whom. 

Some people particularly value the experience of alleviating other people's struggles, but it seems somewhat perverse to opt to keep struggle around, not so that you can experience it, but so that someone else can, and you can alleviate it. 

Often the people who are pro “a little bit of struggle” live lives with relatively little struggle or perhaps the only struggle is how hard they work at their high-powered jobs. This makes me think the preference is aesthetic, and not based on enough direct experience to be taken at face value. 

It's very possible that the best world is an extraordinarily boring one -- one that has little room for heroism because all the quests have been accomplished. If there are quests, we should certainly do them, but we should not keep quests around that we could solve. 

I am someone who loves quests. I struggle to relax on the weekends or on vacations. I have an inbuilt restlessness and striving. But I nonetheless want the best utopia to live in for those around me, not the one that I would find most stimulating. I am confident that someone like me will be able to find trouble in paradise. But we shouldn’t make it easy…