I'm taking a stand against Virtual Reality—but it won't be easy.

Durango, Colorado

People who bum free wifi in order to play video games in public spaces—like your local McDonald's, public library, or a table outside of a mall or restaurant—usually fit a predictable demographic. They're almost invariably underemployed males ranging from their late teenage years into early adulthood. Most often, these manchild video gamers are in their 20s or 30s and apparently unable to afford fast enough internet at home for high-powered online gaming.

While I won't rip into these overgrown children for spending their days playing make-believe (that's an article for another time), I recently witnessed a personal first in this realm. While this manchild was older—he looked to be in his late 30s if not early 40s—he was sitting on a bench in a small mall, poaching a wifi network in order to play on his Oculus Quest VR headset.

Yes, I witnessed a fully-grown man with gray in his beard sitting on a bench in a public mall, white goggles strapped over his eyes, controllers in both hands, swatting at the air as the sounds of combat blasted over his headset.

I stopped and watched in utter amazement as this guy flailed his arms in the air, absolutely oblivious to the real world around him. I almost pulled my phone out to take a picture but stopped myself... but would he have known? Absolutely not. He was entirely lost to the world, caught up in a virtual war zone that he found eminently more interesting than real life.

The First Steps of Virtual Reality

Instead of the manchild from the mall, you get a photo of this manchild playing VR video games in his socks. Shout out to Aimee for letting me fly in VR 🦸

When Meta first launched the Metaverse, I was bracing myself to write a diatribe against virtual reality—but its lackluster adoption rate following the initial surge of media seemed to validate my dislike for the entire concept of virtual reality. However, it seems that virtual reality (and augmented reality) as an idea just will not die.

I firmly believe that VR is the future of media and technology, and this belief continues to be confirmed through major investments from other firms, such as Apple—now the first company in the world to have reached a 3 trillion dollar valuation. The recent launch of Apple's Vision Pro headset confirms that we'll continue to march inexorably toward a technological future built on virtual reality.

The thing is, while VR might be the future, I don't want any part of it.

I refuse to become an automaton, standing in a whitewashed room, headset strapped to my face, completely immersed in a virtual world of pixels and data being force-fed to my senses. I refuse to have my experience of the natural world mediated by a lens covered in pixels and data. Instead, I'm going to fight viciously to continue living my life out in the real world for the rest of my existence.

I'm drawing a line in the sand right here and right now: I will never purchase a virtual reality or augmented reality headset. 

I'm not arguing about whether or not virtual reality will come to pass. I'm not even arguing against its immersiveness or against the fun and enjoyment that VR video games and other media offer. Hell, I've played a few different VR games on Oculus, and yeah, they're pretty fucking fun.

Even so, we're facing an imminent future where the real world is set to be displaced by an imaginary world of pixels and data. Even with Augmented Reality headsets like the Vision Pro, the unspoken belief behind these technologies is that real life is boring, and in order to spice it up and make it more interesting, it needs to be augmented with a digital overlay.

I reject that belief categorically.

Or at least, I reject that we have to buy into that belief and lifestyle. Because there's a key problem: for many people, that assertion may actually be true.

Enter Ready Player One

Durango, Colorado

As a self-professed sci-fi and fantasy nerd, I've sampled science fiction across the genre and across the ages. Of all sci-fi I have read and watched, the book and film that I think hits closest to home as a reality that we might very well end up living is Ready Player One. And no, that's not a good thing.

In short, Ready Player One is a dystopian sci-fi novel in which the protagonist, Wade Watts, and his friends live their entire lives in virtual reality. Wade lives in "the Stacks," a slum in which mobile home trailers have been stacked on top of each other, dozens high, in never-ending towers of misery. Accidental explosions are common, leading to extensive deaths of the underclass.

Wade goes to school in VR. At times, he works in VR. But most importantly: he plays in VR and makes friends in VR. Everything of import happens in this virtual world, because the real world sucks ass. The environment has been destroyed—the outside world is a desert wasteland filled with stacks and stacks of single wide mobile homes.

Aside from the complete and utter annihilation of the environment, we're already not too far away from this vision. (Ok, maybe we're not too far away from environmental collapse, either.) I've known a number of people whose lives are frankly a bit abysmal, and for them, spending their days in their mobile home viewing life through a television and video game console is much more engaging than heading outside and facing the stark reality of the ass end of nowhere where they're living.

And the problem is: it's cheaper, too.

Traveling the world and seeing its beautiful sites with your own eyes is, unfortunately, a luxury experience. As VR continues to propagate and get more immersive and lifelike, why would you pay for a plane ticket to fly halfway around the world, pay for lodging, and hike for hours to visit a stunning waterfall, when you can watch a thousand Youtube videos of that same hike, for free, in your apartment?

(Need help affording your next epic trip? Be sure to read my travel hacking article.)

If a Youtube video isn't immersive enough, what about a three-dimensional virtual National Park tour?

Think this is made up? Think again—the NPS has been filming and publishing such tours for years now. Here's an article rounding up just a few of the virtual tours offered by the NPS.

With the advent of virtual reality headsets, these virtual experiences of natural places are more engaging and realistic than ever before.

Instead of going through the pain and suffering of climbing an actual mountain, you can climb one in virtual reality from the comfort of your living room. No, really—The Climb was one of the first games to launch on Oculus, and it's already into its second rendition.

Engineer Mountain

There are many different angles to parse out here, several of which I hope to explore in future articles. There's the obvious angle of people avoiding doing actual difficult things in real life and instead, spending their days standing in their living rooms at home (or sitting in public malls) playing make-believe. But to the point at hand: it will now forever be cheaper to pay $499 for a Meta Quest headset and bum free wifi than it will be to go have an actual adventure.

While the $3,499 Vision Pro headset sounds astronomically expensive, if you compare even that price to the cost of outdoor gear, plane tickets, lodging, etc., etc. ... it's always going to be cheaper to sit at home and play your cute little video games.

Going outside and having real experiences will, unfortunately, become the domain of the wealthy, while the underprivileged will experience the world virtually.

Rejecting VR Won't Be Easy

Riding mountain bikes is hard - and doing hard things is good for you.

I reject virtual reality because I believe deeply in the beauty and the value of the natural world and in real life. The thing is, it often takes an immense amount of time, focus, and attention to appreciate the beauty that we're surrounded by every day. It's not as flashy and attention-grabbing as a video game.

Instead, you need to pause and notice the small micro beauty around you—the dew drops on a blade of grass in the morning. The family of chipmunks scurrying to and fro across the campsite as I type this, the mother carrying pine cones to their den, and the children running along beside, observing and learning from her as she gathers food.

These small moments will never grab the attention in the same way that an explosion in a blockbuster movie will. And yet, they're so much more vitally important for our thriving as human animals.

It will be especially difficult to reject VR as market and economic forces continue to inexorably pull us into the Matrix. Paying thousands of dollars to fly around the world to hike in Nepal, with brutally-cold winds whipping down off the Himalayas and stinging your face, your quads protesting against the strain of the climb, your lungs gasping for oxygen in the thin air, sounds insane when you could pay $20 to buy a video game to experience Nepalese hiking in crystal-clear 4k video that might be even more vivid than real life.

Soon, peer pressure will mount for you and me to adopt this technology. When your friends want to communicate via an app or program that is only accessible via an Apple Vision Pro headset, will you be able to say no? Social pressure often leads to the adoption of new technologies in this way. For instance, my ex-wife is the reason that I first got text messaging on my flip phone, back when you were charged per text message sent and received. Social media communication pressure also prompted my first smartphone purchase. And once you've added a new technology, it's almost impossible to go back.

Finally, the force that I'm most fearful of: employment and economic opportunities will eventually demand the adoption of VR. Can you imagine if you had refused to get a smartphone... ever... and still used a flip phone, or *gasp* a landline? My dad still communicates using a flip phone, despite Verizon telling him every year that it won't work anymore (last I checked, it still does).

To put the economic forces in perspective, for the last 5 years, I've worked for companies whose primary product consists of building apps. I effectively produce content published primarily on smartphone apps. If I had tried to resist the adoption of the smartphone, where would my career be now? I probably wouldn't have one.

I think the same thing will eventually happen with virtual reality, and it might happen very soon for those of us who are professional "content creators." If the audience consuming the content is ingesting it in VR or AR, content creators will need to go to where the audience is, no matter how abhorrent they might find their form of media consumption.

What's the End Game?

Durango, Colorado

So what, then, will be the eventual result of this rebellion? What's the plan here? If we refuse to acquiesce to the forward march of technological "progress" and refuse to strap VR headsets to our faces, are we destined to be social outcasts with no way to communicate with other people? Will we be unemployable luddites who are unwilling to work in the modern world? Will we even be able to access the basic information and tools that we need for our survival in the modern world? (For example, what happens if we eventually need to pay our taxes in virtual reality?)

I don't know the answer to these questions. Earlier, I asserted that I will never purchase a virtual reality or augmented reality headset. If I've learned anything in life, it's that making predictions about the future (especially absolute statements such as that one) is downright farcical. How can I possibly predict such a thing? How can I possibly know what the future will hold?

I can't. But this virtual world has gone fucking far enough. I refuse to live a life of make-believe, a life spent surrounded by four walls where I never see the sun. I refuse to sacrifice challenging, painful adventures for virtual experiences that don't require me to leave my house.

Continuing to live an Outside 365 life will be harder than ever, but it's a value that I believe in with all my heart. It's a difficult path, but it's a rewarding one.

Rewarding enough to fight for.