Metaverse is the Matrix

By Jason Lim

A recent Wall Street Journal article headlined, "Digital Addictions Are Drowning Us in Dopamine," has an interesting subtitle: "Rising rates of depression and anxiety in wealthy countries like the U.S. may be a result of our brains getting hooked on the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure."

It's basically talking about the surge of games, social media, and other behavioral addictions facilitated by the proliferation of smart phones, tablets, and, in Korea's case, cheap PC-bangs. The COVID lockdown of the last 18 months didn't help, of course.

This is nothing new. We are suckers for constant stimulation and recognition. We loved it when we went to high school and wanted to fit in and were noticed by everyone. Now that social interactions have moved online, the speed by which our needs are craved and being met has accelerated beyond the ability of our brain to maintain a healthy equilibrium.

The sheer velocity of familiar social media pings and "Katalk's" of the world is ubiquitous, immediate and overwhelming. The young, whose brain is still developing, are at most risk of locking in these digital addictions as the default cognitive pattern.

One of the fundamentals of addiction treatment is to stop the behavior, since each instance of the same behavior will deepen the cognitive groove of its neural pathway. With digital addiction, one way to do that is to go offline. Basically, stop engaging with computers and electronics. Make them unavailable. After all, they are nice-to-haves, not must-haves. Until recently, that is.

With the work from home and school from home phenomena that hit the world's industrialized countries during COVID, it has become impossible to take refuge from the digital world. The blurring of the boundary between the offline and online has accelerated so fast that it's now almost seamless for many.

Zoom, WebEx, Facetime, Skype, MS Teams, and many more apps are everywhere, incessantly demanding porcelain attention and smile that brooks no quarter for my resting bitch face. I always have to be at my professional best and can't have any face downtime. It's exhausting.

It's also ego-deflating and anxiety-inducing. According to Wired articles titled, "Zoom dysmorphia is following us into the real world," dermatologist and cosmetic surgeons have seen a huge surge of people wanting medical work done on their appearance after spending continuous time looking at themselves on video conferencing calls. Further, "Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse," the authors wrote in a presentation obtained by The Wall Street Journal from an internal study.

Anyway, it's pretty obvious by now that the digital world that consists of games, social media, video conferencing, etc. is addictive and unhealthy. It's about to get worse because the metaverse is coming.

According to Reuters, the term "metaverse," coined in the 1992 dystopian novel "Snow Crash," is used to describe immersive, shared spaces accessed across different platforms where the physical and digital converge. Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg has described it as an "embodied internet."

In fact, Facebook is betting its future on the metaverse. Leveraging its Oculus 2 virtual reality headset, it launched the Horizon Workrooms app virtual-reality remote work app where users of the company's Oculus Quest 2 headsets can hold meetings as avatar versions of themselves. It's no longer our faces talking to each other over a 2-D screen. It's our avatars interacting with one another in a virtual-physical space, meeting, talking, presenting and maybe even sharing rumors gathered around a virtual water cooler.

In a way, this was inevitable. The COVID quarantine had everyone imagining just such a world. A "Ready Player One" world where we can be the best versions of our imagined selves and do things that we only could imagine ourselves doing. I don't know about you, but I could stand to lose about 20 pounds and maybe regain some hairline. If I can't do it offline, maybe I can be that guy in the metaverse.

Sure. Who am I kidding? If human beings are so prone to addiction in a 2-D world in which going offline is still an option, what would happen to us when such refuge is impossible? Imagine the level of addiction that we would have in a metaverse world in which stimulation, pleasure and social connection are multi-sensory, all-encompassing and immediate.

Dysmorphia, anxiety and depression will likewise be as omnipresent and urgent. At this point, there is no treatment. There is no way to stop and get off this train. We would be thrust into this world from birth with no ability to recognize its virtuality and make an intentional decision to disembark. The velocity at which life happens would make it impossible to opt out.

Welcome to the metaverse. Welcome to the matrix. We would have literally created our own matrix, which we would be pathetically waiting for Morpheus to come calling with a red or blue pill to save us from.

Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.