I don't know if this was the example in question, but I know at some point last year I came across a

I don't know if this was the example in question, but I know at some point last year I came across a challenge for writers of the world to focus more on utopian visions of the future.

Challenges like that always grab my imagination, but I have a hard time with the idea of utopia.

I know this will be very unpopular to say and I guess that's why I'm burying it here, but still saying it: as far as I'm concerned, much of the world is close enough to being a utopia today, and yet it's pretty hard to find anyone who doesn't think everything is very terrible and awful and we're all doomed.

"We're doomed": that's the fashionable take. Really, the only take.

However, most people have a good supply of safe water, people are generally fed, fewer people than ever are super poor and there's less war than ever. That's as much as I can be bothered to defend the position right now. It's all true though.

I've become more and more convinced that humans just kind of lose it when there's no collective threat. If we aren't actually threatened, we'll make up a threat.

Here's an easier way to say it: if we got to a point where there was basically no murder in the world, but one year there were two murders in one city, right? People would say that crime is out of control in that city.

Even if we did live in a Gene Rodenberry style utopia, I don't think we'd ever admit it to ourselves, and if no one allows themselves to feel like they are in a utopia, are you really in a utopia?