The antidote I've used to cure any despair has been to think about all of these technologies (and the world generally) from the perspective of an average person

The antidote I've used to cure any despair has been to think about all of these technologies (and the world generally) from the perspective of an average person. The average person doesn't care about "privacy issues" as presented by elite media. They generally just feel that ads are an annoying but reasonable tradeoff to get access to various online services for cheap and do their best to ignore them. The metaverse doesn't really exist, and neither does AGI. These impact no one except for smart people overthinking things. To the extent that AI effects anyone it's pretty much nothing in comparison to literally anything else in their life, e.g. their neighbors dog being mistreated and yowling at all hours of the day, how their kid is doing in school, literally anything else except for what you are talking about in your post. Same goes for a whole laundry list of things HN loves to talk about forever and always: the market caps of various companies and net worths of certain individuals, etc. Getting in touch with normal people and their concerns is absolutely key to staying sane when you make your living in an industry full of people overthinking things constantly. A cheeky way to put this is "go touch grass".