I wrote my last posting about the “metaverse,” which (in one form or another) experts assure us is the “3.0” future of the Internet. I was reading further more about it last night and I read the following:
“The metaverse will take Big Data, biometrics, digital currencies (Bitcoin and its 10,000 brethren), blockchain technology, NFTs, VR, AR, haptic devices, the internet of things (IoT), machine learning, and quantum computing, and throw them all into a metaphysical blender.”
John Mac Ghlionn “How Meta”
I want nothing to do with any of that.
Is this naïve?
Am I refusing to accept developing trends? Am I willfully blind? Am I walking away from the future?
A former student criticized my stepping away from Twitter. He said that was like someone stepping away from radio in the 1930s when FDR broadcast his fireside chats over the airwaves. To ignore the communication medium of the day was to walk away from the public conversation, he claimed. Well, I was happy to walk away from the public conversation, considering what Twitter had become. No constructive conversations were happening there. It was a sort of virtual stadium for gladiators to slug it out over 246-characters in microblogging. Twitter was mostly trolls and insults; it was “cancel culture” and piling-on. I witnessed people being far from their best selves. Someone once said that while everyone has freedom of speech, not everyone should have a microphone. I agree. So I walked away from social media and “Internet 2.0.” No regrets.
But can I similarly afford to walk away from the metaverse and “Internet 3.0”? Will necessity force my hand? If I want to communicate with doctors or research and buy merchandise, will I have to do so in the metaverse? Can I buy airplane tickets without it? Can I shop for a new car without entering the metaverse?
We shall see.
Can you function as an adult in our society today without using the Internet?
Not really.
THINKING AHEAD
I spend time nowadays thinking about the next stage of my life. In a few years I will retire from the public school system, and my daughters will be launched into college and beyond. It will be a new era for me; I can reinvent myself.
One hopes that by the time one is entering senior-citizen territory, one knows how to live.
What do I mean by that?
I mean that I know the style of life which suits me. I don’t mean what “makes me happy.” I mean that which leaves me content. I am content in how my days pass, I am purring like a cat. I feel good. My body feels good. My mind is engaged and active.
Should I be specific?
Sure.
I will wake up around dawn and get my morning swim. I do this on weekends now and during the summer during vacation. I feel wonderful when I get out of the pool. The only problem is that the pool can be crowded early in the morning. It is full of mostly old people; I will be old by then.
Then I will take a pause to eat a large-ish early lunch. I will peruse the two to three newspapers I read each day. I will think. I will reflect. Because of my swim, my appetite will be strong. A strong body helps to keep the mind strong.
Then around three or four in the afternoon I will play tennis, at least every other day or so. Then a beer and conversation with the tennis buddies afterwards. Tennis is my “fun” and social workout.
I will finally try to get a good bike ride around dusk. I love taking my road bike along the beach and allowing my heart to power my legs, my lungs to breathe, and to enjoy the beauty of the California coast with my eyes. There to my right are the foothills of the Central Coast, and to my left is the Pacific Ocean as the sun sets behind it. It is wonderful. I will try and finish my ride right as the sun has set. I will be hungry from the exercise. I will put my bike on my car, and grab a quick meal on the way home.
I will eat well, because I have earned my appetite through exercise. I will sleep well, since I have exhausted my body during the day. This will be the cornerstone of my life.
This is much how I spent my days during the quarantine, which was perhaps a dress-rehearsal for retirement. Even with the stress on my daughters and wife who suffered in the pandemic, I did fine myself. I did not need much more than what I had during that time.
This is a sustainable lifestyle for me in retirement. There are some expenses required in terms of athletic facilities and equipment upkeep. But it is not much.
I will exercise. I will read. I will write for my blog. Maybe some travel. Never having been on the hedonic treadmill, I don’t need much. It definitely costs a lot just to live. But I should have enough.
I will be in my sixties.
It will be wonderful
I will have earned my retirement. I will have taught for 32 years-before retiring.
THE FUTURE
Now let me return to the metaverse.
I just described my retirement lifestyle. Why would I spend time in the metaverse during that time? Why should I care about that?
I like the real world. Arduous exercise. The California sun. Friends and family. Good literature.
I look forward to reading Tom Jones and other weighty tomes of serious literature. As a full-time worker and committed parent I often lack the time and energy to read books like that. It will be different in the future.
So I doubt I will spend much time in the metaverse.
Why would I? What does it offer?
I hear the Devil’s Advocate’s voice which whispers in my ear the following: “It is not a binary choice between the ‘real world’ and the metaverse. The two will blend together and become largely indistinguishable.”
Maybe.
But existing in the metaverse unavoidably has a cost to living in the real world. I can’t see it otherwise.
I prefer the real world. I have learned to live in it relatively well. I can achieve a measure of Zen calmness; I am comfortable in my own skin. That is hard earned. It was not always this way. When I was young I struggled in the way which the young seem to do. I wonder if younger people might prefer the metaverse to the real world. They take to it in a way I never will?
Then there is this possible truth: I might be unable to participate fully in our commercial or intellectual life if I am not fluent in the metaverse. The future will be there, or so we are told.
But if I am retired in my sixties, does that even really matter? Why should I care about keeping my thumb on the pulse of online life? What am I giving up? Do I care so much about the future? I think I care much more about the past, and the present even more so.
Because I am in the autumn of my life.
We shall see.
But I cannot find much attraction in the “hive mind” of the metaverse.
But I will be open to using it when and where it is necessary. I will keep an open mind. Maybe I will be surprised? Might I come to embrace the metaverse?
I doubt it.
I was an early adopter of “Internet 1.0” and this Internet space is a product of it. With the arrival of “social media” and “Internet 2.0” I was an eager adopter until middle age, at which time I took a step away. Twitter and Facebook did not ultimately move my life forward. The social media of “Internet 2.0” came to appear “anti-social” and unhealthy to me. Now with “Internet 3.0” and the metaverse I am looking at retirement and increasingly want nothing to do with new developments of online life.
Maybe this is the natural progression of me embracing the new when I was young, and then aging out of emerging technologies as I got older. Now that I am old it is all beyond me. Perhaps it has always been thus.
But the years have helped me to understand what is healthy for me, and what is not.
I talked to one of my high school students the other day who decried social media and online life. She claimed after so much fruitless online learning and other Internet “black holes,” that her generation would reject technological exchange in favor of real life contacts. I listened to her. But then I asked her how many hours she and her peers spent on their iPhones per day as reported by Screen Time. The average seems to be around five or six hours per day.
If that is the case, are young people already half-way onto the metaverse already? Is this how we live now?
I think so.
You see them walking around with their faces staring into the screens of their phones. They seem to be stuck. Hour after hour after hour. What are they looking at? What are they thinking about? Where is their consciousness located? News? Gossip? Sports? Pop culture? Literature? Politics? Scandals? Persiflage? Pornography? A mix of all these? Look at the below photo –
You can argue we are almost half-way to living our lives online right now. So are we already primed to take the next step into the metaverse?
Is it not as big a change as one might think?
Maybe.
All the experts claim the metaverse is where we are headed.
But I don’t think I will be.
The California sun. The swimming pool. The tennis court. Classic literature and poetry. History and firearms. A mind and a body which have been exercised – “use it or lose it” applies only more as a person gets older. The sweat stings my eyes as my body strains in exertion. The sagebrush smell of the California foothills. My family. My friends.
It has been that way for me since the 1970s. Since when I was a kid.
And it will be this way until I die.
The metaverse I will approach with skepticism.
If it can add value to all which I have valued, I might use it.
But if not, I will ignore it. As I have ignored most of social media – the “Internet 2.0,” so called, for the past five or so years. So maybe the 3.0 Internet iteration (the “metaverse,” supposedly) is already beyond me.
Like Edith Wharton’s protagonist Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence, I would wear it proudly: “Say I’m old-fashioned: that’s enough.” My daughters might roll their eyes as I flounder with new technologies, just as I have done with my own father and technology for the past 25 years. As I get older I care less about cutting-edge developments and fall behind the times…
Fine, fine, fine.
I am ok with falling behind the times.
Hold on to what is most important, Richard. Ignore the rest.
Simplify, simplify, simplify.
So, dear reader, I ask you this in all seriousness. What can I do? My webpage is a product of “Internet 1.0” which is seen as too boring and static for modern tastes. The models for my webpage were Michel de Montaigne and George Templeton Strong. It is a sort of personal diary as might have been seen in the past, or some Stoic philosopher’s journal from the ancient world. That was my intention, at least.
Yes, of course, in 2022 this content would not be marketable or “interesting” to viewers. It would be “too boring.” My webpage is old-school. It has relatively few viewers. It will never go “viral.” I don’t want it to. It is a passion-project hobby, not a money-making machine.
That being said, how could I bring my webpage – and my life – into the “Internet 3.0” era?
I don’t see it. I have tried. This essay is all about my efforts to do so.
Anyone have any ideas?
Am I missing something?
I love the past, and I live in the present. But the future?
I find myself relatively uninterested.
But a love of the past, coupled with involvement in the present, implies a hope for the future.
Hope for the future?
All is cloudy and murky. I strain through the mists to make out the future.
The “metaverse”? Something else? Worth my time and attention? Or not?
We shall see.
But I suspect I know now all I need to know.
Stephen Ambrose
