Meta Spent 40 Billion on the Metaverse and All I Got Was This Laggy Avatar

I spent two weeks living in the metaverse. Well, trying to. Turns out the future of human interaction is mostly empty conference rooms and legless avatars.

Meta’s been burning through cash—$46 billion since 2019—building Horizon Worlds, their flagship metaverse platform. I figured I should actually try it before writing it off completely. So I bought a Quest 3, charged it up, and dove in.

First impression: nausea. Motion sickness hit me within 15 minutes. That’s apparently normal. Your brain doesn’t like the disconnect between what your eyes see and what your inner ear feels. Some people adapt. I’m not one of them.

But I pushed through. Loaded into Horizon Worlds. The tutorial is… fine. You learn to walk, grab objects, teleport. Then they drop you into the main hub.

It’s a ghost town.

There were maybe eight people in the central plaza when I logged in. For context, Second Life—a platform from 2003—has more concurrent users. I tried joining a “meeting” hosted by a tech company. Three people showed up, including me. We sat around a virtual table for 40 minutes discussing quarterly projections. My avatar couldn’t lean back in the chair.

The technology is neat in small doses. I tried a VR sculpting app called Medium—actually impressive. You can create 3D art intuitively. I also tested a collaborative workspace tool where distributed teams build designs together. That had potential.

But here’s the problem: nobody wants to wear a headset for eight hours. My face hurt after 90 minutes. The battery died after two hours. You can’t grab coffee, take notes, or glance at your phone without removing the headset. It’s isolating in a way that defeats the purpose of “connection.”

I talked to a developer building metaverse real estate platforms. He’s made decent money—selling virtual land to brands who want a presence in the space “just in case.” He admitted most properties sit empty. “It’s speculative,” he said. “Like buying domain names in 1997.”

The honest truth? Gaming is where VR shines. Beat Saber, Half-Life: Alyx, racing sims—they’re genuinely fun. But meetings? Social hangouts? That feels forced.

Zuckerberg believes we’ll all be working and socializing in VR within a decade. Maybe. But right now, the metaverse feels like an expensive solution looking for a problem.

I returned my Quest 3. My neck thanked me.