Virtual Reality as a Source of Suffering

In the future, virtual reality may offer experiences that are radically different from the ones we feel in our regular lives. They may be very pleasant and desirable, something that an ordinary life can hardly offer. However, this may come at a price - our regular lives will become much more boring in comparison.

Much felt life satisfaction comes from comparisons with other people or previous experiences. Buying a new wristwatch may be awesome, but maybe less so if all of your friends have much more advanced models. Running for a few minutes may be either a regular exercise you do not think twice about or a thrilling experience if you spent the last months recovering from a knee injury. A related concept is a Hedonic adaptation, which says that people quickly return to stable levels of happiness after major positive or negative life changes.

If we are focused on ways our experiences could be better, we tend to feel less good about the present ones. However, the opposite is also true: by spending time thinking about relatively worse experiences that we (luckily) do not have to live through, the value of the current one increases. William B. Irvine calls this technique negative visualization.

The source of negative visualization may be a recollection of situations from your own life. It may also come from other people, e.g. suffering from disabilities or living in poverty. You may know these people personally or find out about their lives from books or movies.

For me, practising this technique makes me value my life more, be more content with what I have, and feel more empathy for less fortunate people.

Perhaps these effects could be amplified by bringing the negative visualization technique to virtual reality. Instead of being a source of sensations that are hard to attain outside of it, we may experience how *bad* life could be -- and, for many people, is. What it's like to be deaf or blind? Or to be forced to sit in a wheelchair? Or to suffer from tinnitus? Perhaps even more afflictions could be simulated with more advanced technologies, e.g. depression or chronic pain.

Obviously, it is not necessary to wait for the advancement of technology to try the technique which originated more than two thousand years ago. To start, just think how bad life could be — and how good it actually is in contrast.