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Most people spend quite a lot of time having "fake experiences". TV, movies, and video games are wildly popular, and consume quite a lot of people's time. As
by bjt 13y ago
Most people spend quite a lot of time having "fake experiences". TV, movies, and video games are wildly popular, and consume quite a lot of people's time. As they become more immersive through VR, and provide an even better escape from reality, it's natural to expect them to become more popular, not less.
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoTV, movie, and video game story-lines also near-uniformly consist of situations that would be unpleasant or even traumatizing to actually live through. Everyone thinks it's a great story when the heroine sets out to avenge her father's murder and ends up saving the world. Most people do not actually want to have their father murdered and then deal with an existentially-threatening war for the survival of the human species. Likewise, everyone enjoys a good round of the Hero's Journey, but most people don't really want Spiderman-level responsibility (and yet find superheroism largely meaningless without it). Many people really enjoy sports dramas in film. Very few people want to pack endless hours over a period of years into athletic training and then find out they've only got even odds against the opponent who also trained hard. Even fewer people want to just beat sports video-games by some athletic equivalent of "Rare Candies", leveling up without actually training or working hard. Oh, and people who actually try to do the stuff portrayed in romantic comedies are called creeps, let alone the entire creepy-vampire-romance section of the bookstore. People would have a much better point about escapism "overtaking" real life if more of our culture's fantasies consisted of experiences we actually really want to live through when confronted with the possibility.