Left: Aella, 2023.
Right: noemamag, 2025.

How about instead of optimizing for minimal suffering, we optimize for agency?

Plenty of high-agency humans choose to live in some version of misery, some even thrive in it.

Obviously there are conflicts with agency (maybe Trump wants to invade Canada, but Canada wants to stay independent) so boundaries must exist to balance different groups, but not for the purpose of stripping away agency for the sake of a higher calling.

Maybe this looks like larger nature reserves with more protected spaces favouring specific subgroups by design. Though hard to imagine not needing to succumb to some forms of population control for edge cases, due to limited space/resources that would inevitably overflow into conflict from competition of growth.