A few years ago, a commercial aired during the Super Bowl premiering the “Metaverse.”It featured a group of friends looking at a fantastical painting of jungle animals. Soon, the painting comes to life, and the friends find themselves in the painting itself. The painting is full of life, the animals are dancing to a beat, and the friends join in the dance. The commercial ends with a sentence of print:“This is going to be fun.”The Metaverse features an immersive virtual reality wherein people can create virtual avatars of their own design that interact with each other. Recently, Apple released the “Apple Vision Pro”; again, the commercial for this product featured enticing images.A man puts on electronic goggles and, as Roger Hodgson’s “Dreamer” plays in the background, screens appear before his eyes and icons that he can click with his hands inspace.Then, we see a montage of different users of the Apple Vision Pro.Throughout, these virtual projections transpose themselves onto the person’s physical surroundings, and the screens merge into the user’s eyes. Perhaps the most striking image is the final one, when the first man we saw is actually making toast for his daughter. Once it is ready, he turns off his screen and serves her the toast as he smiles at her through his goggles. While these commercials might very well sound like something straight out of a dystopian novel, our culture has certainly been prepped for this transition.Many of us, at least many younger people, spend most of our days on screens that can transport us anywhere we want anytime we want, often at the expense of those physically around us. We live like angels who can escape the physical limitations of time and space. That’s our cultural moment