Brave New World. Hunger Games. The Handmaid's Tale. Divergent. Fahrenheit 451. Star Wars. War of the Worlds. Matched. V for Vendetta. Gattaca. WALL-E. Ender's Game. The Giver. Sir Thomas More's Utopia.

Besides being all of my favorite books and movies (this is myarticle), all of these books and movies are unified by their genres. There are different versions but they all portray potential futures of our world. Some foresee stellar wars, other's have sci-fi rebellions, and some predict a lot of fat people. But I noticed something in common; almost all of them picture a uniformed, advanced, structured society. In their future, there are factions, uniforms, global P.A systems, enforced schedules and curfews. We have monarchies instead of democracies. Often, there's censorship and bans on access to knowledge, like books or the Internet. There's also an uncanny amount of apocalypses.

Our world today is a multi-cultured, opinionated, tumultuous one. In America, we are not the most free and diverse country but it is a huge part of our reputation. So why do we envision a future without the above? Is it because we have such a doomed, pessimistic opinion of the present and can only imagine a universe opposite to present day?

To us, and these authors and directors, a utopia is found in complete order, peace, and sustainability. Our nature denies independence, danger and unhappiness. And so our ideal future denies those also. But, at least fictionally, it is proven that such societies are insubstantial. It all starts out with a fully-functioning society where everybody thinks everything is normal. And then there's that one person that arises and says "hey, things are lowkey bad" so they find a secret group or a mentor and stir up some trouble. Then they tear down the government and install the leader of the rebellion as their leader and start a "new age."

I think this shows that we want a perfect world but the potential of that actually happening is scary. That in reality, paradise has too much happiness, it's too restricting. We can always shoot for a better world but once our dream society becomes a reality, we want to change it again. If we want to obtain this fictional, dream-landscape, we have to give up our right to make mistakes and, essentially, our free will.