The mere concept of imagining improvement in our overall situations, or maybe even a particularly stressful one, is a great motivation to figure out how things can actually get better. In contexts outside of dystopian literature, many innovations are made out of convenience. When someone finds a task a bit annoying, they usually find some added source of frustration in life that they seek to fix. This in itself is not a conscious thought that things can get better, but it does seem to assume that. Especially if the person continues to figure out how to fix that something. In this example of dealing with a nuisance, a much lesser version of “imagining that things could get better” seems to be at play. This does make sense as one implies living in a world of perpetual comfort, and the original quote implies living in a world of discomfort and oppression. But perhaps the significance of this difference lies in the boundary that separates unpleasant conditions from a dystopia.
A utopia and a dystopia are opposite sides of the same coin, a yin and yang, the darkness and the light. You can’t have one without the other, aspects of both in moderation are needed to have an ideal world or society. In order to answer this question, you have to first understand what the question is really asking. It’s not that positive thinking isn’t amazing, but one has to be able to face reality with something tangible at some point. In essence, utopian thinking isn’t necessarily the way to overcome a dystopia, but it does provide insight into ways to approach how a dystopia could potentially be overcome. Too much of anything is bad, so you don’t want an area that appears to have nothing wrong, or an area that has everything that could ever go wrong, be wrong.
