So true. I’ve been working on this for about six years, since realising during a PhD research program that we can’t have a Metaverse until certain things are sorted out. That is why the for-profit company Meta will never be successful, I watch their continued demise with no surprise. The only way it could possibly succeed is if it went non-profit, but the chances of that are about zero, at least for now.
I too have a child, a daughter who was 12 when I started researching.
I can’t bring myself to forcing her through the final part of her education, as we can see even the education establishment is fallling apart. Kids my daughter’s age have watched as we systematically destroyed their school program and everything that follows in a way that they mostly can’t have a coherent path to any kind of security as adults.
We’ve really messed them up.
And it is our duty to put it right, as only we know exactly how we messed up.
None of it is their fault, they can’t be blamed for what comes next, good or bad.
And that is where the majority of adults are still messing up, it seems to me.
What comes next could be good or bad, though there seems to be a defeatist / doomerist school of thought who seem to want everyone to down tools and accept we are all washed up.

(Strategically downing tools to push things through is another matter, I applaud that, where we see it happening).
There are a few amongst the doomers who know that a defeated, broken population are much easier to rule over, and feed to the meat grinder, like the followers of any cult.
The answer to all the problems is to realise that the world is not zero-sum.
It might have been, up until a few years ago, when we started to use solar power.
Now we are doing that, it is not zero sum, but moving increasingly towards abundance. But the old school still in power still manage to keep most people believing scarcity is necessary and inevitable.
All profit driven companies and people depend on the strength of capital to continue wielding it as a weapon against all others.
That capital is being physically diluted by the increasing amounts of Joules of energy which we are accepting from the sun and putting to our use.
Those Joules are convertible to both clean hydrogen fuel, and money, and any number of other good things using standard technology.
But still we see no acknowledgement of that by financial authorities who should be issuing money backed by it per the ideals of Austrian Economics, free to all people, since the product was donated.
So the solution is pretty simple, accept the energy of the sun and all value in capital is lost, but we gain a new sustainable world with none of the pollution, in which everyone can begin truly collaborating, to have all of the benefits of things like the Metaverse, research on actual cures for diseases (rather than just the symptoms), space research, even fusion research, and an infinity of other things, with none of the dystopia.
I think the mess of disinformation and propaganda we are seeing right now is us arriving to this inevitable conclusion as a species.
It isn’t pretty watching it, a bit like seeing septic puss being squeezed out, but once its out, we’ll be much better, I believe.

“Better out than in! ”