A lot of people explain that the metaverse is a virtual world, like in Ready Player One. Put on a pair of glasses and you’re in a whole new world where you can do whatever you want.
When Zuckerberg changed Facebook’s name to meta, the demo he made, made it seem like you just needed to slap on a pair of VR glasses and boom; you would be in another realm. But they were all wrong. The metaverse is not a place; the metaverse is a time node. You must be a little confused, but I will break it down further.
The Metaverse describes a moment when our collective digital life is more valuable than our real life. It won’t happen overnight. It turns out that the Metaverse is not like a personal computer or a smartphone. It’s a single invention that didn’t exist yesterday but was suddenly invented today. The Metaverse is a moment that has been brewing and accumulating over the past 20 years and will eventually happen.
Consider that almost every important part of our lives—work, play—has all been digitized, and our jobs have changed from factories to notebooks. From a conference room with tables and chairs to an online meeting, our friendship changed from neighbors and friends to fans and live stream viewers. Where do you go now to find like-minded people? Not bars and stadiums, but comment areas for Facebook groups and short videos. Did you know that the total number of people playing PUBG alone is more than all the kids playing basketball, football, and volleyball combined? Even our identity and who we are have been digitized. Everyone can only see them after filters and beauty transformations. No one knows what they look like in the real world without filters.
With the popularization of digital currency and NFT, your assets will also be fully digitized. The ape avatar has become the Rolex of the new era, and the King of Glory skin is the Hermes wallet and Armani jeans of this generation of young people, because when everyone spends most of their time online, what you use to show off must also be virtual and digital. If you look at the current trend for another ten or twenty years, there will finally be a moment when our collective digital world is stronger than the real thing.
You may feel conflicted, but remember that in the past, 100% of our time and energy was spent in the real world. The invention of the television dropped this percentage to 80%, and the advent of the personal computer dropped it to 70%. Smartphones now allow us to spend almost half our time in a virtual world. Now you take your phone out of your pocket, but sooner or later another invention will be a pair of smart glasses or something that will put the digital world in front of your eyes 24 hours a day. By that time, 90% of our time and energy will be spent in the virtual world, our metaverse.
You ask, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Human nature does not like change. Every major technological change, whether it is the industrial revolution, personal computers, the Internet, smart phones, or artificial intelligence, in every era, there will always be people who think that this will be the beginning of the end of mankind. I think this is inevitable in the process of human development. It doesn’t matter whether it is good or bad, the metaverse is full of curiosity and expectation.
