Humans aren't the only ones that don't do well when given everything. Even post scarcity every creature needs to be entertained, but what is needed to entertain becomes increasingly more elusive.
https://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition.php?term=Law%20Of%20Diminishing%20Returns -- Anon Guest
[AN: I have problems with Universe 25's design and that will emerge in the story below. The video actually covers elements of U25's issues at time mark 6:15]
You can have everything you need and never be satisfied, was an ancient Human idiom that confounded many new to Humans. It warranted further investigation and came to a Peak at Graveworld 3T4-9RHU-FW09. According to the records, they had made a world with everything the people could possibly need. The people who lived there had identical housing, identical access to water, identical parks. Identical furniture, Identical views of other identical apartments with identical windows. Identical streets lined with identical faux greenery and identical routes to identical workplaces.
They had everything they needed. Perfect nutrition, perfect apartments, and perfect monotony, according to the surviving diaries. For a time, things went well, but only for a time. The identical playgrounds were full of children in identical clothing, who got identical schooling to fit identical jobs.
Then, to use the Human vernacular, things went pants.
The population growth stopped. The last baby was born. Some focussed exclusively on their appearance. Some focussed exclusively on sex. Some focussed exclusively on murder. Disease grew because people crowded into single apartments when the neighbouring ones were pristine and vacant. Society collapsed. Civilisation crumbled. A world... died.
The rooms, the food, the apartments, the carbon-copy apartments and rubber-stamp streets all maintained by solar-powered machines... looked... perfect. They had everything they could need. Regulated and doled out in perfect proportions. The people in charge thought that this was enough. It wasn't.
People. Need. Variety. Not merely Deathworlders, but all people. The most shocking thing about Graveworld 3T4-9RHU-FW09 was the fact that it was a Havenworlder colony. Worse, too, that the Humans had a term for it from their own history. Colony collapse cause - death by paradise.
In a neighbouring world, a mere three star systems separate from 3T4-9RHU-FW09, the colonists were permitted hobbies. Arts, crafts, distractions and the freedom to customise their identical structures. It should have suffered the same fate as 3T4-9RHU-FW09, but it did not. It was still thriving, the initial identical colony buildings a part of their history, painted in rainbows and murals and abstract shapes, added to or subtracted from with sculptures and bas reliefs, the plastic trees replaces with organic ones and a multitude of grafted, fruiting branches.
The houses that sprang up around the initial colony were masterpieces of architecture. Works of art. Everything around the starting point became works of art. The entire colony had become dedicated to creation. This example, never clearer in difference, became a defining case study in cogniscent rights.
Every creature with self-awareness needs certain things. One among the many is a method of self-expression.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / peshkova]
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