The mortality conundrum and VR

Apologies for the severe lack of blog posts lately. I’ve been a bit pre-occupied with doing non-digital things in the world as of late. I’ve started doing some fairly intense kung-fu classes, attempted to learn a winter sport or two, and have been doing a fair bit of traveling.

For the first time in my life, I visited Europe. Copenhagen was my destination and I spent a wonderful weekend there. I proceeded to Finland from there and spent a week in Helsinki at a design conference. From there, I met up with a friend in Iceland had has a blast for an entire week exploring waterfalls, glaciers, volcanoes, geysers, hot springs, and the Aurora Borealis.

For years now, people in their thirties and forties have been asking me how old I am. When they realize that I’m still in my early twenties, they are quick to dish out one famous piece of advice: travel. Because according to them, if we don’t do it now, we will never have time to do it.

I embarked on this Scandinavian adventure because this was the first time in my adult life that I actually had the financial resources to do it. And it was fantastic. It opened my mind to so many new experiences and lifestyles. It also had a side-effect in making me really anxious that I won’t possibly be able to see the entire world in my lifetime.

It’s a strange thing to accept that one day, we will be no more. While grim, this realization also helps in lighting a fire in our assess to make the most of life right now. It’s just a more mature #YOLO anthem, at its core. It creates a strong inner voice inside of you that’s telling you to go explore the world and learn as much as you possibly can before your inevitable death.

The bug bites the hardest when you return from such a trip, trying to adjust back to the routine of normal life. Your mind is hit with profound moments of reflection when you think about all the different ways your life could have gone if one little thing happened differently years ago. It’s the butterfly effect in action — and it only gets stronger as the years go by.

On one hand, there’s the safety of home, the comfort of routine, and the joy of the familiar. On the other, there’s the thrill of adventure, the wonder of the unknown, and the desire to explore. The cognitive dissonance between these two extremes waxes and wanes as we go through different phases of our life. Adolescents and young adults crave for the latter while the middle-aged and the older folk prefer the former.

To achieve a perfect balance between the two is what most strive for. The elusive and delicate split of yin and yang. A lot of this relies on many factors in our lives that are, frankly, heavily reliant on luck and aren’t really in our control. The pyramid of time, money, and energy need to be in perfect order for the yin and the yang to be evenly balanced. Then there’s the added complexity of relationships, social status, political conflicts, and more.

Fear not, though. Virtual Reality is here to help. It promises to fulfill your wishes of visiting Hawaii by having you simply don a VR headset and experience a 360 degree cam of someone else who actually captured the footage. It promises to let you feel the thrill of being a special forces operative storming a terrorist base in Afghanistan — all without the actual danger of it. It lets you experience what it’s like to swim alongside a blue whale — with no possible way of drowning or facing your fear of the deep blue sea.

While great in theory, VR can actually limit us from reaching our potential as a species. Science fiction movies portray us as pioneers of the universe, creating space colonies and traveling at lightspeed through galaxies and time. But if most of human desire is satisfied through virtual reality, why would we ever bother expanding outward? All our wants and needs are inward. We’re tricking our minds into thinking that we have everything.

One theory claims that this is why intelligent life hasn’t attempted to contact us yet. All the civilizations perfect some sort of “second life” technology, so powerful that the entire species chooses to live its lives inside of the virtual world instead of risking energy and money towards outward exploration. It’s a godsent for people with actual physical and mental disabilities, but for the rest of the healthy world, it’s cancerous.

Conforming to social expectations of doing everything in the virtual world can also become a real danger. Nobody would be willing to try a new business venture and disrupt an industry in the real world when they can simply experiment with a microeconomy to validate their idea in the virtual world.

We’re already so far ahead that the only way to limit it now is to control the amount of “reality” infused into VR. It’s just an illusion at the end of the day, but how far can it go before we can’t distinguish it from the actual world and start to prefer our virtual lives than our real ones?

While a morality conundrum plaguing every human life isn’t ideal, it’s what makes us human. It’s what lets us take risks and try the unexpected to see what kind of outcome we get. It’s why we have different personality types and it’s why these mutations survived so many years of evolution.

To replace it all with VR would mean that we’d be afraid to do anything in the real world. We’d never face our fears, we’d never try something new, and we’d all become complacent creatures of comfort. Conformity is the last thing we want as humans, so believe it or not, having the conflicting morality conundrum is actually what keeps us striving to go forward.