Would it be worth it?

[mordant]

... We can argue, get heated, maybe spend some time apart, maybe break up altogether. Not exactly the most pleasant thing but still a learning experience and room for personal growth. Hardly a 'paradise' with zero strife or suffering.

So please, anyone who wants to maintain that this will cause us to utterly stagnate, WHY? I just don't get it. At all. We're talking about people not being able to act upon their racist, homophobic and other harmful ideologies, an increase in safety and healthcare service, and ensuring that all people everywhere have access to safe, comfortable housing, food and water. Beyond that, not much else radically different. Hardly utopian. Just a semi-forceful restraint on our baser instincts and stupidity.

Completely agree (granted your hypothetical) and feel this is tied up with the notion that suffering is necessary / ennobling when in fact it's a huge distraction from personal growth and character improvement.

I think people confuse overcoming adversity and the lessons learned from that, with the notion that this is somehow the only or even best avenue for personal growth and the pursuit of wisdom.

I had a period in my life where I was physically constrained by painful chronic illness, which was later completely cured. I can tell you that while I learned to persevere in the face of that particular difficulty, I did so in SPITE of the difficulty, not BECAUSE of it. I am FAR better off now than I was with the illness and have not lacked for opportunities to grow and improve. To the contrary, I have had MORE opportunities to focus on such things. For one thing I am not putting all my life force into a daily slog of survival.

Similarly the separate deaths of my prior wife and my son were distractions from the growth I was already experiencing in the roles of husband and father. They were, and are, losses with heavy costs. They have diminished me. They have deprived me of people I loved and valued. And I submit that to the extent I have had the strength to carry on, it's because I ALREADY possessed it;, it wasn't bestowed on me by grief and loss.

Similarly, just to pick one example, if I did not have to wake up every morning wondering what crazy shit TRump has tweeted or what he and his minions have done to assault our institutions and erode our ethical and compassionate norms, if I did not have to live with the knowledge that people who support this moron exist and thrive in sufficient numbers to have rewarded him with the mutherucking presidency, and that basically no one has the moral courage to do anything usefully substantive about any of it ... if some benevolent alien would squash him like a bug right now, you can bloody well BET I would be (1) better off and (2) not lacking for self advancement opportunities; indeed, if I were far enough down the status ladder I would doubtless have much BETTER chances at breaking out of debt / poverty / disease.