From A Few Notes on the Culture
This isn't accurate as it applies to the Culture: The vast majority of the Culture does not engage in conflict. It also goes undepicted for the most part; the functioning of that society is hand-waved as a product of the Minds. But, it is also depicted as neither a hedonistic free for all, or a bland, blissful meditation on coexistence.
All that would happen is those other places would become dependent on the free food we send them, and certain of their domestic industries would be destroyed as they couldn't compete with the cost of free food being dumped into their economy.
Also here domestically excess food would no longer be produced as if you don't produce any excess you don't have to pay the cost of shipping it, or doing anything with it. Everything would become "just in time" or made immediately 1 to 1 with a specific request. So the post scarcity impression we have now would go away pretty fast.
So I don't think we actually are post scarcity with regards to almost anything currently. Efficiency is very high I would say, so high, and we're so productive that we occasionally end up with wasted resources caused by poorly estimating demand.
Unfortunately, before any of that happens, security, police, and military will be going post-scarcity, while those in power are pretty selfish.
Right now, there are tons of goods that are effectively post scarcity.
The amount of free information and entertainment (available online) is insanely higher than anything that existed even 20 years ago.
The post scarcity Utopia is being created right now, by capitalism.
Post scarcity is something that applies on a per good basis. For example nobody has ever had to pay for the air that they breath, because air isnt a scarce good. And post scarcity is being quickly applied to more and more goods.
Well, a reader of fiction is not truly content without conflict and challenge.
But I’m not sure it’s fair to extrapolate from that to a principle about how real societies can operate. After all, fiction always pumps conflict and challenge up to 11 compared to the real world. Pick a popular book or movie at random: what’s the chance that somewhere in its plot, some character tries to murder another character? I’d say pretty high. In real life, the vast majority of people go through their lives without anyone ever trying to kill them, and that’s probably been true for most or all of human history. But that doesn’t make life incurably boring.
This also applies to conceptions of heaven, the best description of which I found in the movie Defending Your Life, in which the worthy deceased ascend to become "citizens of the universe" and tackle bigger, cosmic challenges with their vastly increased intellect.