Recently, I read the following pessimistic assessment of the state of humanity:
“In the future, …. we will surrender ourselves to our entertainment. We will become so distracted and dazed by our fictions that we’ll lose our sense of what is real. We will make our escapes so comprehensive that we cannot free ourselves from them. The result will be a populace that forgets how to think, how to empathize with one another, even how to govern and be governed.” – Megan Garber, “We Are Already Living in the Metaverse,” — The Atlantic, March 2023