At the other end of these problems, the potential for unbounded individual expression presents its own worries. As in video games, metaverse users create their own digital personas, and others must accept the user in just the way he wishes to be perceived at that moment. Unlike in the physical world, where one’s claims about oneself are subject to the scrutiny of others’ mental and sensory assessments, the digital embodiment, accentuated via microtransaction purchases, may be all that other users ever see—never the flesh-and-blood human behind it. The ability to reconfigure personal identity at whim effectively imposes each person’s self-construction on everyone else in the metaverse, a prospect made more unsettling as virtual interactions increasingly supplant physical ones.
This individual autonomy will not inexorably yield better individuals. Instant gratification undermines the critical virtues of fortitude, the commitment to pursue goods despite their difficulty, and temperance, the resolve to abstain from pleasant but harmful things. Gone is the arduous process of self-mastery that comes with striving toward excellence despite adversity; gone, too, are the profound emotional and personal connections enabled by physical, face-to-face encounters. We risk trading a complete and fulfilled human life—made possible by hard lessons and often-troubled relationships—for a dopamine-fueled virtual alternative.
At bottom, the metaverse speaks to a longing as old as the human experience: to escape this flawed world for a better one.
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