Is the concept of a utopia is also a dystopia as well?

I think the reason why most ideas about utopias turn dystopian is the way they're constructed, either:

  • We imagine what perfect for one person, or one group of people, and apply that to everyone.
  • We imagine utopia as having everything because we imagine that's how we make things better, adding more stuff. But of course not everyone likes the same stuff, and consumption isn't a great strategy for happiness.

Also it seems like we imagine utopia will have a tipping point, if we just get enough of X, it will have a cascading effect that will make everything better. Or there's some single choice and one path will lead to utopia if we get it just right, but everything else is a disaster.

But I think we can come up with an idea of utopia that's more realistic. For example, instead of imagining adding stuff to create utopia, what about taking things away? And then when they're all gone we'd have a perfect absence of those problems. For example, one idea might be:

And that actually seems possible because right now we have tons of things to be afraid of. A lot of the world is afraid of missing out on basic needs like food and shelter. And even in developed countries we're afraid of being unemployed or affording medical care or retirement.

There are lots of problems that we could solve if we wanted to, and we're not because we apparently think it's more important to make a few people very wealthy.

Also, thinking of utopia as removing bad things also means that it's clearer to measure progress and easier to plan the path ahead. Instead of being worried that dystopia is inevitable, we can see what problems we've solved, and what we still need to work on.

/r/TrueAskReddit Thread