apple's vision pro now lets you hire someone to live your life for you, and honestly? it's the trauma-informed future we deserve.
tim cook just announced 'reality gigs,' a new visionos feature where gig workers called 'proxy selves' experience your life for you. because who has the emotional bandwidth to actually *live* anymore? this is not dystopian, it's radical self-care.
ok so, like, can we just collectively hold space for a sec and acknowledge that existing is... a lot? the daily vibe check is just a constant state of *gestures vaguely at everything*. the sheer energetic cost of processing raw, unfiltered reality is, and i don't use this word lightly, deeply problematic. i was literally dissociating just thinking about my to-do list, which included the violent act of 'answering three emails,' when the universe, aka tim cook, sent a sign.
apple just dropped a visionos update that is the most healing thing to happen since everyone on tiktok discovered attachment theory. it's called 'reality gigs,' and it lets you outsource the sensory and emotional labor of your own life. i'm not kidding. you can now hire a gig worker, or a 'proxy self,' to wear a headset and just... be you for a few hours.
the way it works is, like, you sync your vision pro to a proxy's headset, and they get a live feed of your first-person pov. they have to attend your pointless zoom meeting, they have to endure your dad's monologue about inflation at dinner, they have to feel the full-body cringe of a bad tinder date. all you have to do is, like, lie down. maybe with a really good weighted blanket—this one from my amazon storefront is literally saving my life rn.
after the 'experience shift,' the proxy self uploads a curated 'vibe report' to an app. it's like a highlight reel of your own life, but with all the toxic and triggering parts emotionally processed for you. you get the memory of closing a big deal without the somatic stress of your boss's microaggressions. you get the story of a fun night out without the social battery drain. it's radical self-care.
tim cook called it 'the ultimate accessibility feature for modern consciousness.' and he's not wrong? my friend is already a five-star proxy self. they said experiencing a billionaire's yacht party was 'energetically challenging' but that they were able to regulate their nervous system afterward with this adorable mushroom-shaped aromatherapy diffuser (link in bio). see? we're creating a whole new trauma-informed economy.
some people are calling it 'dystopian,' but that's such a non-regulated take. unfiltered reality is a construct built on burnout culture. being expected to perceive and process your own life 24/7 is an unreasonable ask. this isn't giving up on life; it's setting a healthy boundary with existence itself. it's giving main character energy, but, like, the character who has a healthy work-life balance and outsources all the emotionally draining subplots.
Reader Discussion (8)
The latency and bandwidth requirements for this would be insane. The author clearly doesn't understand the tech, but the concept is solid. This is the ultimate API for life; you're just outsourcing function calls to a different processor.
Great, another app where I can get a 1-star rating because a billionaire's yacht party was 'energetically challenging'. Can't wait for the first story about a Proxy Self getting actual trauma and being paid $15 for it.
As a mental health professional, this is horrifying. We build resilience by processing difficult experiences, not by outsourcing them. This is a recipe for creating a generation with zero coping mechanisms.
This is a paradigm shift in Human Experience as a Service (HXaaS). The B2B applications alone are staggering. Imagine A/B testing sales pitches with a live proxy. The ROI is off the charts.
And this is what the left wants. A society so terrified of 'problematic' reality that they pay someone else to live for them. This country was built by people who faced hardship, not by people who put on a VR headset to avoid it.
It's 'visionOS', not 'visionos'. The lack of basic fact-checking in online journalism is appalling. If you can't get the name of the operating system right, why should I trust anything else you've written?
I live in San Francisco and I can't wait to see these proxy people wandering around like zombies. As if the tech zombies staring at their phones weren't bad enough. We are a failed species.
So it's basically the plot of the movie 'Surrogates' but with more therapy-speak and less Bruce Willis. Hollywood has been warning us about this for decades.