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Stakes come down to emotions, your characters need to have emotions or perhaps in the case of scifi machine characters, something that replaces emotion as a motivating force.

+1 Mark Baker, yes these are "desires", but to me "desire" is too generalized.

The emotion could be guilt; or romantic love, or hatred, or lust. It could be parental love. It could be outrage at injustice. It could be empathy for pain. It could be love of a sibling or a friend. 

Your character living an idyllic life is either a normal human being, or a sociopath. Sociopaths are only concerned for themselves and no others. They don't feel guilt, they don't mind causing pain for their own selfish gain, they don't fall in love. The emotions they feel are all self-centered: lust, anger, satisfaction at revenge or cruelty, superiority or egomania, careless laughter at the suffering of others because they have zero empathy. 

The sociopaths are the villains of the world. They don't care about future generations, or often their own children. They care about assets and defenses so they can do whatever they want, as cruelly as they want, to live their own perfect life as little kings with all their own physical desires satisfied.

If your character is a sociopath, his goals are private and sensual, often with wealth and power topping the list, usually with many servants, sexual and otherwise, on demand. Often with extremely expensive tastes in entertaining himself, like owning sports teams, or being dictator of a country. The power over lives, life and death, is a form of lust, and for sociopaths often satisfying to exercise by causing death.

Otherwise, if your character is like roughly 98% of people, pick an **unselfish** emotion to create stakes. These are other-centered. Don't think just "positive", disgust with a sociopath beating their child in public is an other-centered emotion. A rich white man hating the KKK is an other-centered emotion; because the KKK doesn't hate **him** for the color of his skin. 

Of course positive emotions toward others serve too: He is exposed to the conditions of orphans, being cared for by a tragically underfunded facility, and cannot get them out of his mind. He may try to be selfish, to put them out of his mind, but he goes somewhere to have fun and all he can think about is the price of his dinner could have bought twenty children a hot meal. His airfare could have bought 30 beds.

Ultimately his priorities change, he has to help. The personal satisfaction of that, derived from seeing his help work, is fine. Until it dissipates, and he has to help some more. 

The stakes are based on unselfish emotions, such as an intolerance to unfairness or suffering in others.

Stakes can be based on other-love, of course, loving their spouse or child more than they love their own comfort or wealth.

The stakes that destroy what your character **thought** was his perfect life, are created by realizing he cannot be happy in that life as long as he cares about some other people. He has to choose between being a sociopath that only cares about himself, and sacrificing those pleasures to do the right thing. And in the end, out of his love for others, he chooses sacrifice, because he could not live with himself otherwise.

The ending, of course, is up to you. It can still be a satisfying story if his decision to sacrifice everything still leaves him being satisfied, with a **new** perfect life that isn't so self-centered. Or if he decides to risk everything, but succeeds without losing everything. Many heroes go into the final battle with their life on the line, outnumbered and bound to lose, and emerge wounded but victorious.

In your case, you seem to be writing a normal character. He will have normal emotions, perhaps buried, but he cannot be entirely self-centered. Some other-centered emotions have to move him to act, at first perhaps believing he can mollify those emotions without interrupting his lifestyle, they just need a little cash and he has it, but ultimately that isn't enough. Once he got involved he was exposed to MORE of the misery or injustice, and needs to do MORE. Those are the escalations; once the altruist or love-of-another in him is awakened, it takes over his life and he just cannot turn back.