Will Humans Dream of Electric Sheep?
What makes us human?

With the world carelessly running down the metaverse rabbit hole, the complete digitalization of everyday lives feels inevitable.

The boundary between being a machine and a human has never come so close to becoming a blur.

What makes us human? Is it our subconscious? Maybe the set of our memories and emotions is reinforced by the internal compass guiding us through the paths of life. Now, whatever the case may be, one thing that can be agreed upon is that this “thing” is unique and hidden within each being.
Or, more accurately, it used to be.

Despite these features being exclusively internal and unique to each person, we have started, as a species, to gradually de-privatize events of our lives and, subsequently- ourselves. This motion (ironically) is being continuously fuelled by ourselves and begs the question: are we forsaking our own humanity in the process?

The amounts of digital content that we consume only grow exponentially. According to the app monitoring firm App Annie an average human spends around 4.8 hours a day on their phone - a third of our waking time (and an hour more than we used to be on our phones in 2019). This mixture of our time-spending tendencies only fuels the disorientation and distortion of what is real.
It is only natural to feel burned out and exhausted by the tempo dictated by today's world.

Universally, when the natural desire for an escape creeps in, we turn to art, poetry, cinema, seeking answers, whether or not anyone has ever felt the way we do in this given moment.

Sure, maybe Bukowski has embedded some wisdom in his poetry that could give us refuge, or cinema by the great masters like Tarkovsky or Kubrick did offer us an interpretation of what the world of tomorrow will feel like. Still, to some extent, this is a historically anomalous scenario we found ourselves in.

Today, we have more questions than answers. All we can say is that as this dilemma will undoubtedly be the great mystery of tomorrow (or maybe even today), thus we should learn how to hold a grasp of humility and humanity as the world descends into the digital metaverse.

Leaving behind our real, flawed lives for the seemingly perfect, idealized digital version of reality might feel fulfilling at first but will eventually cripple our ability to perceive and embrace what is authentic.
We must, now more than ever, accept our flaws and learn to love and live with them.

The world is hardly black and white. In fact, it is the grey spaces in-between that fill the gaps and come to define the puzzle of our human existence.