In the Star Trek series set during the 24th century one of the greatest inventions known to humanity is the holodeck, a room in a building or on a starship where one can recreate anyone, anything, or any setting in a virtual reality using holographic projectors. The technology itself is very optimistic in whether we’ll ever get quite that far along with virtual reality, but it’s a neat idea. If anything today, the holodeck reminds me most of Mark Zuckerberg’s idea for the metaverse. It’s a proposed virtual reality where people can escape from their everyday lives even for just a few minutes and be someone else. Software like this has been around for a long time, I remember a few years ago trying out the program Second Life, without much success. That said, as unsuccessful as my foray into that virtual world was, I nevertheless stayed up all night trying to make it work.

Charles M. Blow wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times last weekend criticizing the idea of the metaverse for denying us some basic elements of our own humanity, in particular our abilities to socially interact and on a more fundamental level to live in the moment. Yesterday evening, a full fourteen hours ago, I sat on a park bench beneath the statue of El Cid in the Plaza de Panama in San Diego’s Balboa Park. I could’ve spent that time checking my social media accounts on my phone, the most widely available version today of what could become Zuck’s metaverse. Instead though I took that forty minutes spent on that bench enjoying the sights around me, listening to the other visitors, to the intoxicating rhythms of the music being played live in the plaza, the sounds of the classic cars parading by on a beautiful Sunday evening in one of the most beautiful cities in this country.

The metaverse can offer solitary people like me a chance to live another life from the comfort of our own homes. And as much as another life is always an alluring prospect, why else daydream, I have the life I’ve been lucky enough to lead. My story is yet to be fully written, so why would I open a new virtual blank slate and start writing all over again?