In our virtual future, why would anyone work?

A flash of the future, over the holidays, that felt like a flash of the past. It happened on Christmas Day, just after lunch, when my father-in-law gave me a virtual reality headset. It looks like a pair of ski goggles. They used to be fearsomely expensive, but recently some bright spark came up with the idea of replacing the screen and the computing power with a slot into which you pop your phone. All you need now is a frame and a couple of lenses, and you’re off into a virtual world. You can get a cardboard one for a tenner.

They’re amazing. We all had a go. First, I went up Mount Everest. Then I put my mother into a shark tank. My wife went on a rollercoaster. For my kids, who are small, I called up Google Street View and put them outside their own house, even though they were inside another one. ‘Wuhhhh…?’ they said. As the grown-ups passed it around, and I watched the children watching us, I imagined them remembering this moment, decades hence. ‘For them,’ I thought, fondly, ‘this could be like it was for us when we got the SodaStream.’

Then I started to feel afraid. Perhaps I’d had too much cheese. Watching that mask go around the room, though, I suddenly realised what the nuclear family could look like at Christmas, a generation from now. It would be four silent people in goggles, side by side on a sofa, wouldn’t it? And today we think it’s bad when people are glued to phones. We haven’t seen the half of it.

I’m a firm believer in the idea that there’s a generational schism developing, right now, of the sort unseen since the days fathers in cardigan waistcoats and thin ties simply couldn’t fathom why their hippy sons wore such stupid trousers.