Living a Second Life in VRChat, why it is completely different from real life, and why Zuck is destined to fail

Talking about my childhood dreams of VR, and why I keep falling out of it.

Published 13. December 2025

I originally wrote this article in 2024, and planned to end it on the note that I was looking forward to seeing how "The Metaverse" - a marketing term adapted by Meta from an old novel, marked the fall of Zuck and Meta. With the current political climate and America rapidly becoming an Oligarchy, Meta's success despite the metaverse failure may just be good proof they already are too big to fail. I am amazed that the metaverse shitshow didn't cause a more public failure.

I remember being under 13 years old and borrowing my family's home computer from time to time. I had been playing PlayStation 2 games at the time but was fed up after finishing the same game for the fourth time, or something like that. Young me was looking for greener pastures. At the time, I had an obsession with sandbox games. I would spend hours crawling the internet for something to fulfill my obsession, ending up with games like Platinum Arts Sandbox and other games based on the Cube 2 engine, as well as tools like Alice. As a kid, I had already built a lot of LEGO, and was sick of the creative limitations imposed by the cost of LEGO kits (and presumably my own patience).

At some point, I stumbled upon Second life, a popular VR(?) game from the 2000s. The promise of infinite creative potential was alluring. You could buy properties and fill them with things you could design and program yourself! It was an everything simulator as far as kid me was concerned. However, due to the 18+ age limit, I was unable to participate. I did learn that there was a thing called Teen second life, but I was too young for this too. Many months were spent obsessing over it, consuming every piece of media I could find about it, preparing for the time I would be old enough to partake.

It wouldn't take long for me to find other outlets for my creative needs. You could make planes in Garry's mod, and this new game called Minecraft allowed you to build almost any structure you could imagine (as long as it was a house, a cave base, a sky base, or an underwater base as far as I was concerned). I completely forgot about Second Life, and Minecraft ended up being my main game for many years, until rhythm games, programming, and real life became more interesting.

Enter VRChat

At some point VRChat popped up. According to Steam, I got VRChat in April of 2018. I have some early memories of checking out various worlds with IRL friends over Discord while bantering. It seemed like a fun thing, but I was generally busy with studies and lived with a partner at the time, so I didn't really have any incentive to dive in. If anything it was more like a fun museum to walk around in, not having anything in common with the userbase. Not very different from a trip abroad, really. Years of playing Minecraft also made me used to wanting a direct creative experience. I didn't want to create worlds to play in, I wanted to play in a world as I created it. In the end, it was a sandbox game that I was looking for all along, not a "moddable" game like VRChat where creation was external.

At some point I got hold of a first generation HTC Vive, and I would stop by VRChat to hang out with a friend of mine. We would visit worlds and some times drink together. I believe it was a go-to activity for me when my partner at the time was out of town, but it's hard to recall. I ended up falling in and out of it, while my friend ended up getting more involved due to lack of employment and other life-related reasons.

COVID Happened

COVID happened, the whole world shut down. I ended up spending time in VRChat hanging out with the same friend as earlier. By then he was well-established in the game, having multiple friend circles. It was very easy for me to just tag along and have fun without needing to perform the initial social networking necessary to bootstrap your new virtual social life. I tried becoming more involved in the game, even creating my own cursed avatar:

I was finally able to properly experience the game. Through VRChat I was able to speak to people I'd never meet in real life, and exchange life stories. In a life that was otherwise plagued by lockdown and isolation, being able to meet random strangers from all walks of life was surprisingly refreshing.

In the end, VRChat inspired me to write my Master's thesis on 3d video encoding, playing around with Voxel Octrees, a data structure that fascinated me. It's not the best master's thesis in the world, but it sure beat what many of my peers ended up with: being free labour for some professors' React-based CRUD frontend project.

Life moves on (for most of us)

At the time of writing, my last time in-game was October 2022, and I know for a fact I was pretty much out of the game by January 2021 due to spending more time in-person with friends during the pandemic. I was getting sick of being terminally online and ended up crashing at friends' places for extended periods of time. In early 2021 there were some restrictions on how many people you could be in contact with outside your household, so we would work with the limits by becoming a household.

My friend ended up staying in VRChat for a while longer, but sooner or later he ended up moving on in life as well. It has been fun catching up recently, as he told me all about what his old VRChat friends were doing nowadays - VRChat people sure are a varied bunch. It seems like a lot of people who hang out in VRChat do so out of escapism - many of those who quit did so as they found meaning in real life. Many of those who didn't were still struggling with various issues. For them, VRChat is an opportunity to live a second life devoid of the problems they face in the real one.

Peering into VRChat through a tiny window

To me, VRChat is the closest you will ever get to seeing what a pure human soul looks like. It is a virtual space where people of all kinds gather voluntarily and are able to express themselves in just the way they want. Race doesn't matter, only the size of your wallet as non-VR users were largely looked down on, and most regulars spend a lot of money on full body motion tracking what you had to say.

VRChat is a whole social ecosystem by itself with its own rules, norms, and common habits. CNLohr, a semi-famous embedded systems programming youtuber, has a great video explaining how the VRChat world is different from the one around us. What I think is especially interesting is the avatar culture. Avatars are mandatory, but what you pick is completely up to you. There are dedicated worlds to visit where you can try on free avatars made by others. Some people make their own, or even commission high-quality avatars from others making a living from engineering personal avatars as a service. My empirical experience is that many people, both women and men, prefer cute anime avatars. Cartoon characters are also common. Most worlds have mirrors that people spend hours in front of getting used to their new virtual self - this is a serious and real extension of peoples identities. I wonder how these avatar trends will change as IRL culture does. I think there are some very interesting papers that could be written about this, if a psycologist/sociologist ever came across it.

Around 2019-2020, channels that uploaded interviews of random people on VRChat started growing on YouTube, with Syrmor probably being the biggest one. Just like with confession boxes, people are able to get things off their chest when they are in a semi-anonymous setting. This turns out to be some very interesting content - it feels like people-watching but for their inner thoughts. I recommend watching a few videos, like kid in vrchat talks about getting bullied. The internet is some times described as "The whole world at your fingertips", and to me I feel that VRChat fits this description better than the internet itself.

Reflecting on virtual lives not lived

I was never able to deep dive into VRChat to the point where I felt like anything more than an outsider, but I was still able to participate and observe, and what I observed was fascinating. VRChat is what happens when people who don't necessarily fit in to the rules, norms, and habits of the real world get to decide what they want for themselves. In the end, real life had enough in store for me, and I didn't have the time or need for a second life, but there are moments I wish I did. The "game" has immense creative potential that I know I would have loved, but alas, I didn't fall into the rabbit hole.

However, from the experiences I did have, I am sure of one thing: Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of Silicon Valley are burning money on something they will never achieve. "The metaverse" will never be anything, because it lacks culture VRChat has. You won't get culture unless people have vast possibilities for making things their own. You can't "design" culture. Silicon Valley, with their safe, flat, and unoffensive "one size fits all" approach will never understand this. Culture is not static - it is ever-evolving and always changing. A one-size-fits-all sterile corporate environment meant to be ok for the lowest common cultural denominator will never be able to fascilitate this. In other words, people want more self expression than the avatars you can pick from in Microsoft Teams. If people can't play around there will be no fun, and if there is no fun, nobody will come.

There is also the problem of time commitment. VRChat has shown that you pretty much have to be terminally online in order to successfully set up a virtual life, and it will most likely be different from your real one (In fact I'd argue you are very much encouraged to separate the two lives). Lowering the barrier of entry requires being able to reach more of your real life in VR, so there is already something for you when you arrive. However, when real life is all around you at all time, the chances of being able to get enough people to drop it for the sake of expensive VR headsets is low. This in turn means your friends will not be in VR. If they aren't there, and you want a low barrier of entry world to vibe in, there's no reason for you to be there either. Making friends as an adult is hard - it takes time and effort to build good connections. Most people don't have time or energy to restart their social lives from scratch.

For 99% of people a VR presence just isn't worth the hassle. It requires dedicating a lot of time and effort. You can also only hang with your VR friends in VR, as the nature of VR means they are most likely geographically distributed. I would argue most people who have tried hanging out in VR come to the realization that meeting people in real life is better.