What remains of happiness when everything is solved?

There is a question that often returns when I imagine a future in which everything works. One of those questions that forces you to stop and think:

what remains of happiness when problems have been solved?

Imagine living in a future—near or distant—in which the progressive reduction of effort required to achieve results has made it possible to obtain anything without effort.

How does that make you feel?

Because in that moment, I believe a question will emerge that until now has remained in the background, concealed by enthusiasm and excitement:

what gives life meaning?

What I wonder is this: what will make a life worthy, desirable, and not empty when it is no longer necessary to struggle to survive, to heal, to produce, to defend, or to improve? And how will our criteria of value change when the frictions that shaped them begin to disappear?

Instinctively, we are led to believe that this is the destination—the natural outcome of progress. A world without friction, without effort, without obstacles. And yet, when I try to look at that world closely, it appears… strangely empty. Not because pleasure is missing, but because something that gives it depth is missing.

Let me bring this back to a personal experience.

During the expedition in Alaska, every day confronted us with problems: a storm to navigate around, a punctured inner tube, a decision to make when our energy was almost gone. Problems that, at first glance, might seem trivial—problems no one, from the outside, would call “necessary.” And yet it was precisely within that continuous sequence of difficulties that I felt a form of deep fulfillment emerge—something I would never have experienced staying safely at home.

It wasn’t the hardship itself that made the experience meaningful. It was the fact that every problem demanded a response. And that response depended on me—on us.

On my body. On my attention. On my ability to observe and adapt. On our ability—mine and Alessandro’s—to function as a team, to hold onto each other, and to move through the storm.

At the end of the day, I wasn’t happy because everything had gone smoothly. I was happy because something had created resistance—and we had found a way to move through it and come out alive.

This kind of experience led me to consider something that, at first, felt counterintuitive. Perhaps—and I say perhaps, allowing myself the benefit of doubt—happiness is not the absence of problems, but their overcoming.

Perhaps what makes a life worthy and desirable is not a perfectly resolved world, but a world that offers a certain degree of resistance. Enough resistance to force us to choose, to measure ourselves against it, to reach toward a solution. Enough to make us feel that our contribution truly matters.

In Alaska, no one had taken problems away from me. In fact, let’s be honest—we went to Alaska precisely to expose ourselves, voluntarily, to problems we no longer encountered in everyday life. We sensed, even then, that this was the path to something deeper: satisfaction, fulfillment, and the feeling of being fully alive.

But in a world where everything is already solved, the risk is different: that we ourselves become redundant. That our actions stop making a difference. That life flows smoothly, yes—but without friction, and therefore without depth.

I am not idealizing suffering or scarcity. I know how real and unjust they can be. But I believe that, if we ever reach a point where the great urgencies have been resolved, we will be forced to confront an uncomfortable question: what kind of problems do we still want to face? Because without problems, there is no orientation. Without orientation, there is no meaning. And without meaning, even happiness risks becoming a smooth surface, impossible to hold onto.

So if the success of modern civilization leads us into a new condition—an era in which it is no longer necessary to do something in order to obtain something else—leaving us in front of a kind of freedom that resembles a desert, how will we satisfy the need for a role? Where will we find emotions like wonder, or the feeling of standing before something mysterious and greater than ourselves? Where will we find a source of motivation strong enough to endure over time and give direction to our lives?

These are questions we must take seriously. Because if it becomes possible to solve the problems that afflict the world today, we must also learn how to live in what remains when the world has been solved.

And perhaps, faced with a world finally resolved—and the emptiness that may follow—the last true defense left to us will be adventure: the voluntary act of creating problems that are worthy of being solved.