"If You Gaze Long Into the Abyss…"

Virtual reality (VR)?

Never mind the big goggle headsets; it’s already happening with every click you make. 

Consider Steven Spielberg’s upcoming movie Ready Player One (which is already being used as a paradigm for upgrading some VR chip companies).  It’s set in 2045. The world is on the brink of chaos (sounds like CNN). And people have found salvation in a virtual reality universe called the OASIS (which, for investors, sounds like cryptocurrencies).

The twist happens when the creator of the OASIS dies and leaves his fortune to the first person to find a digital Easter egg hidden somewhere in the virtual reality kingdom he created. Naturally, because we’re all essentially still herd creatures, the contest grips the entire world.

It’s like the Generation Y equivalent of the 1849-ers Gold Rush.

One Click

The point here is that if you stretch your mind just a little bit you’ll see how this virtual reality is already touching our lives, and how seductive it can be.

Here’s an example: Go to a sporting goods website and click on a blue tent as though you want to buy it. Then go back to work.

Rest assured that blue tent will now follow you around the internet. It’ll show up in ads everywhere you look.

Now take it a step further.

When you click onto the typical types of attention-getting headlines you may notice that you’ll start to see more just like them in links to that article.

And the more you click on disaster news the more of them will show up on your dashboard, so to speak.

It’s like the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said: “And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

In other words, channels like social media world are now producing the world of your choosing when you click on something because it’s simply feeding you with more of the things that it thinks you want to see.

That’s the new “blue tent” reality we’re living in. and it will hunt you down wherever you are on the internet.

There have already been a few outspoken programming engineers who have shed light on this from the sacred halls of Silicon Valley.  The addiction process is real.  The training process is real.  The definition of that world you’re seeing is real.

Virtual reality? It’s already here.

In fact, I’ll bet in less than 10 years those bulky, cover your entire head goggles will be replaced by fashionable looking devices that will take you to what we call today, "the virtual world."

And we’ll spend a great deal of our time there.

Business meetings will take place from anywhere on the planet but will feel in every sense like we are sitting at the same conference table. 

As for "fake news," it may become the biggest barrier to stepping back into “reality” in the future. In the last two weeks alone, widespread use of YouTube permitted across India has shown that over 82% of all video views were related to completely fake video reels. 

And totally false news-feeds captured over 8 out of 10 clicks. 

Now try this: Spend the next week deliberately clicking on headlines with no bad news, no links to terrible events, and no hyped up, trauma-driving leads. Nothing like that.

It’ll be tough to beat that addiction. But what you’ll find is that the bad news will suddenly start to clear up around you.

That doesn’t mean it will disappear. It will simply look like there’s a lot less of it going on.