[This is day #30 of my 30-day microblogging challenge. You can and should still join!

[NOTE: Today I wrote +500 words about the topic in a very scattered and bullet-point-driven way, so I decided to post a fully AI-edited version of the text (with a generic AI with no custom prompts, so it is full of AI-isms).]

Living in VR: When Fiction Feels Just as Real

A few years ago, I found myself moderating a transhumanist Discord server and VR community. We hosted weekly meetups, random hangouts, and lectures—gatherings that regularly drew 30+ people from across the globe. Interestingly enough, most of our regulars were furries.

This was my first real exposure to the furry community, and more specifically, to people who genuinely lived in virtual reality. My co-mod and the server’s founder was a furry who spent nearly every waking hour in VRChat. For him and many others in that space, VR wasn’t a novelty or a gaming peripheral. It was simply life.

Reality is What You Make of It

What struck me most was how many of these people treated their online existence as completely equivalent—or in some cases, superior—to their physical one. They weren’t escaping reality so much as relocating to a different one. They built homes, formed relationships, established reputations, and developed daily routines entirely within virtual spaces.

I’d seen glimpses of this before. World of Warcraft players who raided for eight hours straight, whose guildmates knew them better than their coworkers. But VR was different. WoW at least gives you quests, progression, shared objectives. VRChat offers none of that. It’s pure social space—just people, avatars, and conversation. The fact that anyone chooses to spend their life there says something profound about what humans actually need from their environments.

My Own Descent

I understood this better than I expected to. Years before the VR community, I got completely absorbed by a modded roleplaying server for an RPG. At its peak, we had maybe 100 active players. I would spend my mornings at school daydreaming about my characters, planning afternoon storylines, then log in for hours every evening.

I played a vampire, an elf, a human. When my elf died, she became a fairy. I briefly tried an orc. These weren’t just avatars—they had backstories, personalities, relationships, grudges. I cared about their lives. Genuinely. When something good happened to them, I felt it. When they suffered, I felt that too. They weren’t me, exactly, but they weren’t not me either.

The server produced real friendships, real romantic relationships, real feuds. At one point, I genuinely believed I could only date someone who played or at least understood this game. Think about how absurd that is: a 100-person niche RPG server, and I had mentally excluded the entire rest of humanity from my dating pool.

The best part was the intersection. I’d bring IRL friends into the game and watch them meet my “other” friends—the characters. Or I’d meet someone’s RP character first, then gradually learn about the person behind the keyboard. Both directions felt magical.

The Second Life Precedent

This wasn’t new, of course. Years earlier, I’d heard about a classmate’s father—someone in his 40s—who spent more time and money in Second Life than in his actual life. Others used IMVU, Habbo Hotel, or the dozens of virtual worlds that came and went. The technology changed, but the pattern stayed constant: given the option, many people will simply opt into a different reality.

A Glimpse of What’s Coming

What I saw in that Discord server, in that RPG server, in the stories of Second Life obsessives—that’s the future. Not because technology will force us there, but because given the choice between the constraints of physical reality and the freedom of virtual ones, many people will simply choose the latter.

The jobs of the future might look more like WoW quests than factory work: clear objectives, visible progress, social collaboration toward shared goals. The lives of the future might look more like VRChat: pure social connection, unburdened by geography, appearance, or the accidents of birth.

VR didn’t take off yet because the hardware is still awkward. But the psychology is already there. We just need the interface to catch up to what people actually want to do with it.