As I rummaged through the stacks of countless people, exploring cultures, traditions, and lifestyles, I found myself descending into a rabbit hole. For me, that’s the most beautiful part of being here on Dev. It’s ironic that my favourite activity is searching through memories of the very world I ‘escaped’ from. Ever since Negasi’s update that allowed us access to all curated stacks, I’ve spent my time delving into multiple shades of life on Earth. I must say, life was such a colourful experience.

Initially, I searched by location. Then I decided to pick a date and search stacks across the world. One date stood out—25th December, Christmas Day. There were massive celebrations in many parts of the world. Cities came alive with beautiful lights, and an almost tangible energy hung in the air. It was as if someone had poured a potion of love and kindness into every heart simultaneously. Homes overflowed with laughter, joy, and a shared warmth of belonging.

I tried to compare what I saw with my own experience of Christmas in Nigeria. Back on Earth, Christmas meant chaos—good chaos. Aunties laughing too loudly in the kitchen, kids fighting over who got the biggest chicken drumstick, and the smell of fried rice mingling with the harmattan-dry air. The big cities were crammed with people returning home to experience the best moment of the year. It was never about the gifts; it was about the gathering, the noise, and the shared sense of community.

I remember my last Christmas on Earth vividly. The power went out in the middle of dinner, and we ate in darkness, laughing and using our phones for light. We continued telling stories and sharing the most ridiculous things we’d found online. That memory still lingers, as warm and imperfect as it was.

Here in Dev, I tried to recreate that scene. I constructed every detail from memory—the laughter, the voices, the food. But the voices were flat, the food tasteless, the laughter mechanical. You can programme a sound, but you can’t programme belonging, nor the warmth that fills your heart when a loved one smiles at you.

The emptiness of Dev gnaws at me. It’s not just the absence of time or the lack of dates and traditions. It’s the loss of meaning. I know we have all the things that make Christmas look and sound like Christmas—the lights, the music, the decorations. But what we don’t have is the soul of the celebration. All our festivities have the same hollow feel—they look right but don’t feel right.

This absence runs deeper than just celebrations. On Earth, Christmas brought families together. Here, family is extinct. With no reproduction, there are no new families. People call themselves siblings, brothers, and sisters, but it’s akin to calling someone a ‘friend’ on Facebook. The words have lost their weight and value.

I think about Teni. I met her in a shared memory hub. She reminded me of someone I would have called a friend back on Earth—soft-spoken, quick to smile, the kind of person you feel at ease with immediately. We spent days reliving shared memories, laughing and exchanging thoughts. Then one day, she stopped showing up. No explanation, no goodbye. I wanted to feel angry, but I couldn’t. In a world where nothing ties you to anyone, leaving is as easy as breathing.

One day, I found myself revisiting the stack of my last Christmas on Earth. The hub was quiet. A stranger joined me—a man with a weathered face and a deep voice. “You miss it too?” he asked. His voice carried a longing I recognised. “I thought Dev would be freedom,” I said. “Freedom from sickness, poverty, death. But it feels like I’ve lost something greater.”

He nodded. “Freedom isn’t free,” he replied. “Here, we gained the universe but lost our souls.”

As we sat there, sharing a rare moment of connection, I realised that what we had in Dev wasn’t friendship. Friendship was what I had on Earth—the arguments, the laughter, the vulnerability, the ties that ran so deep they became part of who you were. Here, relationships are a passing convenience, devoid of the weight and permanence that made them matter.

The absence of family feels even heavier. On Earth, family was immutable. You could choose your friends, but not your family. Family ties were strong and unbreakable, like the bond between a mother and child. In Dev, those bonds are a relic, something you only find in memory stacks.

I often wonder why I chose to come here. On Earth, I was a struggling writer. Christmases were often chaotic, filled with the messiness of real life. Yet, that messiness made them beautiful. Here, in this endless expanse of possibility, everything feels curated, clean, and empty. We say we are free in Dev, but we are slaves to a system that strips away our humanity in exchange for a hollow perfection.

If you’re still on Earth, stay there. Hold on to the chaos, the imperfections, the ties that bind you to others. You may be the last frontier keeping us in touch with our truth—our identity, our expressions, and all the messy, wonderful things that make us human. Dev is freedom. That’s what they told us. Freedom from sickness, death, poverty. But they didn’t tell us freedom would feel like a prison without walls. They didn’t tell us that in gaining the universe, we’d lose the threads that make life worth living.

I sit now in my endless expanse of possibility, staring at a digital snowflake that never melts. Somewhere, a voice in my mind whispers, “If this is freedom, why does it feel like loss?”