Is everything you wish you had be good enough?

We're divers / That's why we're in our suits

In Deep Sea Divers, a track off Darwin Deez's underappreciated self-titled pop masterpiece, Darwin asks his partner "Would everything you wish you had be good enough?", and I took that personally.

Consumer culture is mostly about closing the gap between one's desires and their fulfillment. Remember when Amazon's free two-day shipping was revolutionary? Now we count delivery times by the hour. DoorDash is happy to give you as many calories as you can afford in a matter of minutes. All the information you could possibly want is just milliseconds away thanks to always-present 5G.

There's no end in sight to these trends, so where is their natural conclusion? The point at which all of your wishes can be fulfilled instantly. As virtual worlds subsume our physical "meat-space" reality, this endgame doesn't seem too far off.

So what will happen when I can hook up the neuralink and have a fully-immersive experience indistinguishable from physical reality, wherein every single wish I have is instantly fulfilled?

In media like "Snow Crash" and "The Matrix", this idea is explored to a degree. But in both of these "metaverses", there are limits placed on most, if not all, of the inhabitants. And more crucially, all the inhabitants of these metaverses live together, syncronously.

This gets at a unshakeable truth of human nature, that we are social animals. But as we've learned over the past few years in particular, we'll put up with being alone if we're sufficiently distracted.

So in our future metaverse, it's not a given that we'll spend most of our time together. Instead, we'll be content to live in our own worlds that we construct. Why live as a peon in a virtual world of avatars driven by real humans when I can live as a king with convincing NPCs?

In the overworld, some will trade their friends and family to play professional sports, hold positions of power, accumulate wealth, invent new technology, and more.

Most others see value in close relationships.

It's possible I'm not giving humanity enough credit. Wouldn't it be more fun to live out your rock star fantasy in a world where your IRL friends get to play alongside you?