Hedgehogs and the Metaverse
On a winter night, a group of lost hedgehogs comes together, seeking shelter. There is warmth in their numbers, and perhaps together, they can survive the season’s cruelty. They get closer and closer, but soon, they realize a piercing problem — their nature. Just as they can begin to feel each other’s warmth, they can’t help but stab one another with their protruding quills. Get too close, and others will inevitably stab you; stay far apart and suffer cold loneliness.
This is Schopenhauer’s Hedgehog Dilemma, a metaphor about human intimacy and relationships. We are those hedgehogs, trying to escape the cold of loneliness, seeking warmth, yet fearing the pain of getting too close to suffer other’s natural imperfections.
So, what would you do? What would be the lesser evil? Could there be a middle point, a Goldilocks zone where the hedgehogs can feel their warmth while staying far enough from others’ quills?
Like Schopenhauer’s hedgehogs, we’ve had to deal with two years of a Covid-19 winter where social distancing has shown us the importance of friendship, conversations, and social interactions. Locked up in our houses, we’ve searched for better ways to stay connected and feel the warmth of those who are far. Luckily, in the twenty-first century, we have a plethora of tools at our disposal to do that — messaging apps, video calls, online games, and social media. Yes, technology has given us the gift of connectivity. As the cliche would have it, we can get closer to those who are far at the expense of getting far from those who are near. Some call it brilliant, others creepy, and if you’re anything like me, you call it both, finding it sufficient for the broken heart but lightyears away from the real thing.
I wrote these words on my seventh day of self-isolation after testing positive for the Omicron variant. And in this self-isolation, I can’t help but wonder if technology, like social media, became the hedgehogs’ deceiving answer, placing us in a position where there’s enough warmth to avoid cold loneliness and enough distance to prevent pain. Think about it — the world is a click away, and you can shut it down whenever you want. You don’t have to get close enough to suffer others’ imperfections, and at the end of the day, you only see whatever the other wants you to see. With enough distance, even a quill might seem a beautiful feather.
At its birth, social media seemed to be the promised land where people could find old friends, make new ones, and maintain existing connections. Now we know it’s a double-edged sword, and I could give you ten reasons to delete your social media account, but I’d rather have you think of the first time you experienced this technology. I still remember mine.
Being the new unpopular kid in the seventh grade, I created a profile on MySpace where the visitors would be delightfully welcomed to Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Around the World. Long story short, my page had no popularity, so with inexistent traffic, zero engagement, and low morale, I soon forgot about it. Two years later, after Facebook had taken over the web, my friends convinced me to create a profile. For better or worse, this time was different. I still remember the thrill I felt when a girl from my school gave me my first poke. I thought it was the inevitable beginning of a love story, but it ended up being a bizarre, web-only relationship worthy of its Black Mirror episode that left me with my first broken heart.
As social animals, the relationships in our lives give us meaning, help determine our values, and create a sanctuary where we can find shelter from the cold. They are as important as nutrition is to our bodies. Now, I view social media as the sugar in our diets, the sweet treat tapping into our dopaminergic system to make us crave for one more like and one more connection. But nutrition is much more than a glucose roller coaster. Sugar is fun, but it won’t make you healthy, and so it goes with human relationships and interactions. Whether we want it or not, we need the unsavory stuff, the hard-to-chew nutrients that might take weeks or months to process. If you only eat sugar, the superficial stuff, then your system will inevitably collapse.
Human relationships should not only be superficially sweet. They are raw and even bitter at times. They have ups and downs, and yes, sometimes you get the painful quill. It takes a lifetime to build trust and love, but it only takes one action to destroy it. Look up. That lifetime won’t happen on your phone’s screen.
Now, we’re at the dawn of a new technological era — the metaverse, a 3D immersive world that opens up the possibility to work, play, socialize, learn, and interact with one another. If you think about the time we spend staring at a screen, future generations might spend most of their waking life submerged in this digital world. Due to the pandemic, the adoption rate might be faster than ever. Our lives are becoming more deeply entrenched with technology; we’re no longer tethered to the physical world.
Currently, the metaverse is just an idea in the making, and thanks to the Web3 revolution, it will (hopefully) be a decentralized world that will take shape by everyone’s input and participation, using iterative efforts to make an infinite world. After all, empowerment and ownership are some of Web3’s principal ideals. Imagine putting on a headset and further bridging the gap with those far away from us, meeting in the most magical worlds our minds can conjure. This might even fully render office spaces irrelevant, freeing us to live in remote locations closer to nature.
But let’s not be a naive hedgehog — there is a risk for every potential benefit. The metaverse won’t be the idyllic distance between the cold and our quills, and it might even aggravate the detrimental effects social media has on our lives. However, responsibility should not be solely placed on the builders’ shoulders; it should be shared by the users as well. Let’s incorporate all the learnings we’ve acquired from our use of social media and incorporate them into this new digital world. Instead of making it an attention marketplace, let’s create a beautiful culture within and around it, creating a world where we embrace truth and genuine human connections.
People worry that some would prefer this new digital world over the real one. I believe technology should be a means to an end, not the end in and of itself. Technology media is usually perceived as a mirror to the real thing when it’s first invented. But something interesting happens the more we interact with a new media technology — we evolve through the experience and see its flaws. So, perhaps the greatest gift of media technology is that we can see its flaws to learn to appreciate reality even more.
Yes, we might encounter pain when we disconnect from the digital world and come close to one another in the real one. But we should not forget that we can find beauty in pain. Let’s make a circular journey out of this new media technology and allow it to make us appreciate the real world and true human connections even more. Just as with a beautiful rose, if you want to hold it close, you need to be willing to risk a bleeding finger from one of its thorns.
