We are Actual, not Virtual people.

You know, I had intended to do a video discussing the results of the poll that I did a little while ago about what people thought were the most prevalent manifestations of feminism among Muslim women today. Inshallah, that video is coming. But I wanted to just say something briefly about another issue. I wanted to talk about this weird sort of corralling of people out of the real world and into a virtual one. Now, obviously, this has been happening for quite some time, you know, really ever since the Internet came about and particularly over the last twenty years or so.

But with the imminent emergence of the metaverse, it's going to intensify drastically. For a while now, people have felt like and acted like if you're not present and active on social media, you basically don't exist. Your Twitter, your Instagram, your Facebook, your YouTube, your TikTok accounts act as a kind of proof of life to evidence your participation in the world, which is why when one of these companies decides to ban or delete your account, people treat it like it's a human rights violation, like a summary execution or something. Okay. All of this is very, very confused and frankly damaging to one's mental health and one's grip on reality.

The real world exists, and you exist in it. Don't let anyone corral you out of the real world into a virtual world. This is just an attempt to marginalize you, your life, your value, and your real importance as a human being in this world. They want you to participate online because they don't really want you to be active and participate in real life. They want you to overvalue presence and participation online because, frankly, they can control it better.

But your real community is your family, your friends, your neighbors, your colleagues, those people who are actually around you in your physical community, your neighborhood, your city, your town, your state, not the online community. Community. If nothing you say or nothing you do ever appears in a social media post, if nothing you do ever becomes a viral video, you still said it, you still did it, and it is still in your record of deeds with Allah. Never imagine that it counts any less just because maybe you didn't get a bunch of likes on it or shares. We need to remain as Muslims and as men as much as possible a face to face kind of people, people who live and function and operate in the real tangible world habituated to the physicality of life.

You could almost make the argument at this point that social media and the online virtual world is almost like being in a state of intoxication where your mind can be easily misled, your judgment impaired, and your sense of reality skewed. Now I'm not saying that Muslims should not have a presence online, should not participate on social media, and should not find beneficial ways to engage in the metaverse once it becomes prevalent. But let us always try to maintain a sense of perspective about it and never lose track of what's real.