You know, I get the feeling that I should probably say something....

It's a lot like talking about longevity and death, isn't it? I mean every time a topic about treatments for aging comes around, there's always that person. You know who I'm talking about, the one that absolutely must let everybody know that, "It's unnatural. Life has meaning because it is short!"

I always roll my eyes at that person because I know for a fact that they're one bad moment away from begging for their life. Let somebody in a ski mask, holding a gun kick down their front door. Let a drunk driver veer into their opposing lane at 50mph. Let a doctor tell them that the tumor is already at stage 4 and then we can see if they want to extol the virtues of our brief existences.

It's easy for people who are in good health to navel gaze over the hubris of wanting to live forever and yet, nobody wants to die. Not even people who commit suicide want to die, they don't want their lives to end, they want their pain to stop!

We treat pain and suffering the same way. Our cultural upbringing tells us that there is virtue in choosing to suffer, that there is meaning in it. That's it's God's plan. We do this to try and make peace with the traumas and burdens that life forces us to bear. Into every life, a little rain must fall. What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. The sun will rise again tomorrow. The meek shall inherit the Earth.

Bullshit. There is no plan. There was never a goddamned plan!

Nobody wants to be bullied. Nobody wants to be rejected. Nobody wants to be betrayed, or abandoned. Nobody wants to be blind, or paralyzed, or an amputee. Nobody wants cancer. Nobody wants to bury their parents. Nobody wants to be ugly. Nobody wants to try their best and still fail. But it happens anyway. Why? Because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, subjected to other people and circumstances that were beyond your control. We try so hard to force these misfortunes to make sense, but that's just a coping mechanism. Life sucks. Life is chaos.

So, for me, focusing on whatever downsides there could be in people overusing these speculative technologies feels a touch myopic. I'm less interested in what happens if people get bored* from overusing FDVR or AI companions than I am in learning what they were running from.

*They wouldn't. I think it's a safe bet to say that by the time these things become real, if ever, that tuning their performance to give the user the perfect balance of highs and lulls to keep them engaged would be trivial.