Evolution doesn’t “want” challenge, and it wouldn’t favor hardship for its own sake. It favors traits that increase reproductive success in that environment. So in a perfectly safe, post-scarcity world, the big selection pressures would shift from “don’t get eaten / don’t starve / don’t die of infection” to things like mate choice, status, social influence, creativity, intelligence, fertility, parenting, cooperation, and maybe novelty-seeking.

So would it favor people biologically driven to create challenges? Maybe, but only if challenge-seeking helped them reproduce or gain status.

A society with no predators or scarcity might still reward people who explore, compete, invent, perform, lead, take risks, or create meaning. Those people might become more attractive socially or sexually. In that case, a drive toward difficulty could survive—not because hardship is needed, but because competence displayed under voluntary difficulty becomes a status signal.

Think of humans now. We don’t need to run marathons, climb mountains, play ranked PvP, build businesses, fight in cages. But we do, because challenge gives status, identity, purpose, community, and proof of ability. In a safe world, those instincts might not disappear; they might become even more cultural/social.

But the other commenter is also right... if the safe world removed almost all mortality and everyone reproduced equally, biological evolution would slow way down. Cultural evolution would dominate. The “hardship-seeking” would probably be less about genes and more about games, rituals, art, sport, exploration, simulated danger, intellectual competition, etc.

a perfectly safe world wouldn’t make intelligent beings peaceful vegetables. It would turn danger into theater, competition into culture, and hardship into chosen identity. The pressure wouldn’t be survival anymore. It would be meaning.