At least at this stage of human development, hardship is not hard to come by.

I haven't had much hardship in my life, but the two or three serious hardships have usually resulted in growth and good things in my life.

I don't think that over-abundance is too much of an issue really. Most people will have challenges presented to them through the rough edges of life.

Perhaps the thing that our relative abundance can do for us is teach is to see to the challenges we do face as valuable events.

I think we're making the wrong tradeoffs, more so than just having too much in general.

I think we need a complete inversion of reasoning, similar to how I rub most entrepeneurs the wrong way because I'm from the "data is a liability" camp, rather than "data is the new oil" or whatever The Economist sold you.

The important number isn't two thousand calories per day; it's how much you excrete, excrude, and expel per financial quarter, and whether the resulting output gets used in any intelligent way. Industrial capitalism profits this problem away by seeing that the firsthand consumer paid for goods this week, and thus producing some amount of goods to sell the next; and urban civilisation copes with the individual productions by providing various waste management services. So I'm not too pressingly worried about industrial capitalism and its future, if you'll excuse the reference...

However, our thinking is still lacks the holistic perspective. We're still chasing the two thousand calories, rather than asking ourselves, "am I giving the world some good shit?"

Yes

Scaling by sacrificing quality is easy (and profitable, if you can get away with it.) The challenge is to scale without making that sacrifice, in the face of insatiable greed.

We don't have enough of the right stuff.

There is a lot of very low quality food about- and its very hard to avoid it- I have to consciously resist the junk food that is heavily promoted and presented. If you can, grow your own as much as possible. As for entertainment it is more available than ever before for a lower price if not almost free but again an effort needs to be made to consume quality rather than quantity. Yes technology has delivered abundance but also a lot of junk- it takes an effort to a void the junk.

People consuming "endless food" is not a problem of there being too much food, but a problem within those people.

Abundance is a double-edged sword. Food and entertainment overload are real problems. Maybe it's about building new habits, like intentional scarcity, to reclaim balance

This hits deep. We've solved for more, but now we're drowning in it. I wonder if the answer lies in redefining enough - like, how do we train ourselves to embrace limits in a world pushing excess?

I think one must be very clear about his values and priorities. Like he decides what shows to indulge in on Netflix and for how long - and sticks to it and doesn’t feel FOMO about not watching other shows. Remembering the adage “you can do everything, just not all at the same time” might help with grounding oneself. In other words, don’t be greedy!

Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. It's upto the intelligent we use to utilizes resources and materials. Depending on the circumstances I think we can decide on scarcity and abundance in nature. Well that's want I believe and it's a great Post!

We already at capacity in some industry. So much that scaling will be setting a death sentence but the human mind knows no boundary and the need to innovate and find loopholes is where he excel at is what his good at.