I don’t know how you solve excessive waste, it’s maybe a problem of population density more than failing society. If you live on a plot of land in your own home you can exist without producing more garbage than you can process away on your own. So while yes you can’t realistically just tune down society, it’s naive. It’s not true that people can’t exist in a self sustained way as the basis for a thought experiment.

It’s not that garbage or infrastructure repair aren’t problems that need to be dealt with, they now are. Or that you never have to do anything you don’t want to do, even self sustained you have to. I’m saying that you would need to solve them upstream at the source where they are not menial but interesting like the pictures in the meme.