Zuckerberg’s Metaverse scares me. Because it will make us all feel even more disconnected. More fragile. More sad.
It will eat away at our humanity and increase our isolation. We will become performers in our own life. The Metaverse will further destroy our mental health, and that of future generations, as we reconcile our authentic self with the one we present.
We are humans. We were made to walk, run, dance and skin our knees. We were made to breathe in the smells of trees, not plastics. We were designed to connect with nature and all that is around us with wide, curious eyes and dirt under our finger nails. We were made to discover salamanders.
We are not meant to be characters in a video game of our own life. We don’t need a haptic suit and goggles to pick a flower, bounce a ball, pet a dog or dance with our grandmother.
Instead of looking at what is clearly in front of us, we are coached with dopamine hits to live a “better” more immersive life beyond our own gaze. To dive into a phone or headset to shut off the natural world to find happiness is not immersive. It is isolating. We are being signaled to enter an inferior facsimile for a life that already exists in perfect form.
The Metaverse can only thrive with active participants. Brands, people, companies can all make a choice for good. No doubt the Metaverse Makers answering the call of the pied piper will get rich, but at what cost to the rest of us? We are already seeing the damaging effects of constantly gazing at our black mirror. What happens when we start to live inside one?
It is time to take a stand against this Century’s despotic land barons who lack accountability and control us with the magic wand of their app. While free will still exists, I know the choice I will make. Not just for me, but for future generations.
I challenge all brands, looking for the next shiny object to reflect on the bigger picture. And imagine a world even more narrow and lonely than the one our phones have given us. We scroll for meaning, and never seem to find it. We scroll for happiness, and only find impossible comparisons. We scroll to live. But that only happens when we put our devices down. We are broken, and try to fix our spirit by turning to the same thing that got us here. It is a profoundly sad, and ironic cycle.
As advanced as we are, why do we prefer to enter a screen to live, when life is all around us? In beautiful, simple moments we take for granted. Put down your phone for a day, and see what I mean.
Sometimes I wonder, when did our world become not enough?
