Entering the Matrix

I read a fascinating online book called The Day You Discard Your Body by Marshall Brain. He is speaking of trading your body and the external reality it inhabits with an internal computer-simulation of reality.

The reason why you will discard your body so willingly is simple. In the
process of losing your body, you will achieve a level of freedom and longevity
that is unimaginable to us today.

In this book, you will come to understand why you will be so happy to
discard your body. We will look at the many problems that your body creates for
you today, along with the many limitations that it imposes on you. We will then
discuss the technology that will make your body obsolete, and the powerful
social forces that will encourage you to abandon it.

He makes a lot of good points, but I can't help feeling that he is talking about building "The Matrix". Would you be willing to give up reality for a fiction that seemed more real than reality, and was basically a perfect paradise? You could live in your ideal world regardless of what others thought of its impracticality. I worry about who would control and maintain such a system, and who would pay for it. It is definitely food for thought. I highly recommend you read his ideas.

There is one way I would gladly do it, as long as I had paid for it myself, instead of "society" picking up the tab. At the end of my natural life, I would be willing to begin my "unnatural life". At that point, what have you got to lose? Everything is just icing from then on.