Why is it that the discussion of post-industrial society is what it is?

This was the hardest of your questions to get a grip on. :-) You mention disaster fiction, Star Trek, 1984, and Brave New World, and you categorize the first two as post-industrial and the second two as bad-industrial perpetuated. If I look for the intent behind your question... the idea seems to be that visions of the future are limited to destruction, salvation from outside, and dystopia.

Missing from your list of future scenarios is the anodyne dystopia of boredom, which doesn't show up in literature about the future because it's what people are already living in the present, and that's not what they look for in futurology, unless they are perverse enough to want true realism even in their escapism, and experienced enough to know that real life is mostly about boredom and disappointment. The TV series "The Office" comes to mind as a representation of what I'm talking about, though I've never seen it; I just know it's a sitcom about people doing very mundane things every day (like every other sitcom) - and that is reality.

If you're worried that reality might somehow just not contain elements that transcend human routine, don't worry, they are there, they pervade even the everyday world, and human routine is something that must end one day. Human society is an anthill, and anthills are finite entities, they are built, they last, they are eventually destroyed. But an anthill can outlive an individual ant, and in that sense the ant's reality can be nothing but the routine of the anthill.

Humans are more complex than ants and their relation to routine is more complex. The human anthill requires division of labor, and humans prepared to devote themselves to the diverse functional roles implied, in order to exist at all. So the experience of young humans is typically that they first encounter the boredom of human routine as this thing that they never wanted, that existed before them, and which it will be demanded that they accept. They may have their own ideas about how to spend the time of their life, or they may just want to be idle, but either way they will find themselves at odds with the social order to which they have been born. There are places in the social ecosystem where it works differently, but this is how it turns out for many or even most people.

So my thesis is really that boredom is the essence of human life, human society, human history, and human experience. Note well: the essence of human reality, not of reality as a whole, which is bigger than human beings. I will also say that boredom was the essence of preindustrial life as well as of industrial life, and also of any postindustrial life so long as it is still all about human beings. Some people get not to live boring lives, and wonder and terror can also just force themselves upon humanity in a certain time and place; and finally, I should add that people can live amid the boredom and not be bored, if they are absorbed in something. Our Internet society is full of distractions and so the typical Internet citizen is not just flatly bored all the time, they will be in a succession of hyper moods as they engage with one thing after another. But most of it is trivia that has no meaning in the long run and that is why it's reasonable to say that it adds up to boredom.

All these non-boring stories about the future are partly expressive of reality, but they are also just distractions from the boredom for the people who consume them. Apocalypse doesn't solve the problem of giving me a happy free life, but it does solve the problem of boredom! Salvation by aliens is an instance of something exciting and non-boring coming from outside and forcing itself upon us. Huxley and Orwell's worlds actually are boring when they're not oppressive or dissipative, so in that sense they resemble reality.

Some people in some times aren't born to boredom. What this really means is that there's some form of instability. Either it's the instability of novelty, that eventually settles down and becomes a new boredom, or it's the instability of something truly dreadful. Our favorite instability on this site is artificial intelligence, which is a plausible candidate for the thing that really will end "human reality" and inaugurate a whole new Something. There may be a cosmic boredom that eventually sets in on the other side of the singularity, but for now, dealing with everything implied by the rise of AI is already more than anyone can handle. (There may be people out there who are thinking, I can think about the possibilities of AI with equanimity, so I can handle this. But no-one's in charge, the situation is completely out of any sort of consensual control, and in that practical sense the human race isn't "handling" the situation.) There are many other ways to avoid boredom, for example the study of the universe. The main challenge then is just convincing the human race to allow you to spend all your time doing this.

But the original question was about the culture's own image of the future. My thesis is that adults generally know in their bones that their lives are boring, and that fact is itself so familiar as to be boring, so there's no market for stories which say the future itself will also be boring. You're finding the available non-boring narratives unsatisfactory - they're either dystopian or involve wishful thinking. But the problem here is whether there's a viable collective solution to boredom, or whether every such solution will be just another type of Watchtower-like unrealism (I mean the little magazine circulated worldwide by Jehovah's Witnesses, in which future life is an agrarian paradise with the sort of nonstop happiness you only see in TV commercials). I should emphasize that the narratives which dominate the part of the culture that is concerned with the practicalities of the future, such as politics, do not try to solve the boredom problem, that's not remotely on the agenda and it would be considered insanely unrealistic. Realistic politics is about ensuring that the social machine, the division of labor, continues to function, and about dealing with crises when they show up. So it might be regarded as depressing rather than boring.

I can't say that the problem of collective boredom concerns me very much. Like other singularity fans, I have my hands full preparing for that future event, which probably is the end of the boredom as we know it. The task for you may just be to come to grips with your own difference from everyone else, accept that most people will end up in some boring but functionally necessary niche, and then try to make sure that you don't end up like most people.