Sci-fi Slice of Life

So my setting is kind of sci-fi based. I don't want it to be very dark and gritty; I want it to be fairly lighthearted, portraying ~200 years of tech advancement in a positive light.

How do I make conflicts engaging without making them feel like First-World Problems?

It depends on the situation you place your characters in. If they're the privileged elite living in a stratospheric high-rise condo or a flashy ultra-modern space hotel, then yes, it's going to come off as First-World Problems. If they're working-class living down at street level, or farmers on a terraformed colony on Mars, it may be more relatable and engaging.

Can't really advise you without more detailed info.

I can't imagine there'd be very many workers because of how advanced the tech is. By this point, people are mostly taking jobs because they want to, not because they have to. One driving force I'm finding is that while the tech makes living extremely easy and convenient, it also frees up a lot of time and resources for people to focus on hobbies and crafts if they desire. Both technologically-made and hand-made goods exist, and valued for different reasons: the former for their convenience, the latter for their uniqueness.

One character actually is a hotelier. I'd imagine that she still has to deal with unruly or rude guests. She probably has another hotel across town whose owner is highly competitive. Maybe she has a dedicated housekeeping/room service team who works with whatever AIs may be present for maintenance to give a distinct "personal" touch.

Basically, what I want to do is portray super-high tech positively, and find ways to still make the world engaging even when it's pretty close to utopian.

Make it a comedy? Heck w complain about First-World Problems pretty often IRL

I think my best bet is to make the characters strong enough that they are engaging in nearly anything they do. Even something so simple as making a quick snack is going to be done differently by three different people.

I beg to differ. The more tech you have, the more technicians you need to keep the tech working. And the more complex the tech is, the more chances for something to go wrong. No matter how reliable you make it, stuff will still break down and need to be fixed.

Yes and no. A lot of technical work could be done by the automated systems in the same factories that produced the technology - and since those automated systems were probably built by other automated systems, they could also be physically repaired by the factories that produced them.

Programming and design are areas that quite possibly still would be dominated by humans as they are creative processes, but the actual "fixing" would be a matter of fault logged, faulty unit swapped out for functioning unit, faulty unit sent back to factory (even that could be automated) where it is disassembled and the faulty/damaged parts replaced or merely completely scrapped and rendered down for recycling.

Much of our current technology is a) cheap enough and b) "black box" enough that it's cheaper to replace it with a new one than it is to hire a human to fuck around getting into the bloody thing (only to find it's all on one circuit board and the component/system that failed can't be swapped out/replaced) - the industrial robot that assembled it is better equipped to do the repair work and costs less to run.

Even customer service is being automated - automatic checkouts, the self-service kiosks at McDonalds - so even CSR jobs would be rarer, limited to places that cater to people who prefer the "personal" or "human" touch.

Art, music, literature and other creative endeavours, a few "retro" jobs in areas where some "discerning" consumers would prefer to be dealt with by humans.

Asimov wrote stories with robots, and many conflicts were "First World Problems".

That's what I imagined: that some people would prefer the uniqueness of an artisan touch even if it's not as "convenient". Not that they'd be luddites or anything — they most certainly have the usual common gadgetry of the day at home — they just want a more "personal" touch in their service.

Also, I'm finding more and more that I'm actually getting quite good at characterization and enjoy works mainly for their characters, so maybe that's my ace in the hole: make the characters engaging enough that not even their having First-World Problems would be a turnoff. They're still likely to have other faults and events that can be relatable even in such a world.

edited 25th Nov '15 8:39:34 AM by Twentington

I have this idea for a kind of genre I like to call, "Slice of Unlife," where the story follows a bunch of normal people going about their typical everyday lives but in a far-flung setting that renders that everyday life inherently interesting. Regular everyday life on a planetary colony inhabited by both Humans and aliens, for instance.

I have to admit, this concept appeals to me so much partly because such a premise is ideal to showcase worldbuilding. If you have strong enough worldbuilding, it shouldn't be that difficult to come up with a conflict for your slice-of-life characters to contend with.

and that I think is what I'm trying to do. The characters in this world are furry and in a very highly advanced world. They've likely terra formed at least one other planet. They likely deal with AIs on a regular basis. I actually have a couple of those designed too, and they have designs that are esoteric in-universe. I would imagine that the inhabitants see AIs as companions regularly.