You’re sitting in a meeting, and your wife texts you, and it pops up in the corner of your glasses. “Wishing I could be with you. I hate this meeting. There’s no reason for me to be here.”
You want to respond, but you don’t want to pull out your phone because that’s kind of rude. I mean, if it were acceptable to be on your phone you would have been this whole time, because there certainly isn’t anything in your meeting that you need to pay attention to. So you use a “virtual hand” to text back. “I know honey. This meeting is the same. I want you with me too, but not here.”
You make some vague attempt to figure out what the speaker is droning on about, but honestly there is no point. You are almost ready to close your eyes by the time your wife texts again. “How did it come to this? That our whole lives are just meetings with no purpose?” It’s of course a rhetorical question. You both know. The modern world, the metaverse, all of it was designed by billionaires with no interest in reality beyond money and meetings. Bit by bit they took over every aspect of life and replaced it with them, until now even this casual conversation between the two of you could only take place inside one.
“I’m sorry. I love you. I’ll see you tonight.” Of course even that had taken on the trappings of a meeting…it had needed to be scheduled and both of you would need to write reports evaluating whether it indeed had a positive effect on your mental health and productivity, not that you were ever productively working. But at least you would be together. That was something you couldn’t even do in your dreams…not since Meta had found a way to project images of meetings into them.
