Is There Place for a Culture of Caring in the Metaverse?

This one is a genuine time capsule, and I'd rather own that than pretend otherwise.

I wrote it in 2022, when the metaverse was going to reshape work and the question felt urgent. If belonging and connection are what make a culture of caring possible, what happens when the workplace becomes fully immersive and virtual?

The specific technology didn't unfold the way many expected. But I think the underlying question aged better than the branding did, because it wasn't really about the metaverse. It was about whether care survives mediation, whether an organization can make people feel genuinely valued through a screen, an avatar, or whatever interface comes next.

That question is more relevant now than it was then. We've since spent years distributing teams across time zones and interfaces, and the organizations that struggled weren't the ones with the wrong tools. They were the ones that assumed connection would happen on its own, the way it used to when everyone shared a hallway.

The data underneath still holds. Happy people are 31 percent more productive and three times more creative. Whatever the environment, that's what's at stake.

Read this as a thought experiment rather than a prediction. The technology is dated. The question of whether you can build real belonging through a screen is one every distributed organization is still answering, whether deliberately or by default.