The Future According To Me

Recently, I was in Foshan, China, and I believe that it gave signs of what our social future is like.

In Foshan, malls are overbuilt. Too many malls and too few shoppers. Decreasing business activity, and decreasing number of people in the city. It's probably a struggle for most food and beverage establishments. The quality of food is still there though.

Rentals are still too high compared to the business that can be obtained. We were at Muji, and from our observation, nobody bought anything.

All growth seems to come from the virtual world. I saw an event at the shopping mall for the game Love and Deepspace. It's apparently an ikemen game for females, who fall in love with the virtual characters. The event was for the "birthday" of one of the virtual characters, so everyone was cosplaying either as an anime female, or as the birthday character, who had purple hair.

On second thought, the digital world is needed for bare survival of businesses. We look for restaurants with great reviews or recommended by users online. In China, in addition to reviews, you need to have vouchers online or else you're going to lose a lot of business.

Maybe the digital world is necessary for bare survival and a true step into the virtual world is needed for growth.