Age Simulation Suit

To my abstract, scifi inclined mind, this is the potential beginning to what I'd coin The Humble Suit: A suit that simulates a vast array of infirmities legitimately experienced by the muted, ignored, but equally entitled minority. In my fictional world, intelligence isn't an exclusive measurement of one's ability to exploit and exhibit usefulness for the system that owns them, but also includes understanding, empathy and awareness of aspects of reality beyond the exclusively immediately financially lucrative.

In an era where reading and compassion is secondary to entertainment and profiteering, one could wear the suit to experience a temporary intermission of not being oneself as the pinnacle of reality.

I do foresee challenges though, particularly with the probable result for many being the opposite of compassion, where one would dismiss the significance or challenges of, eg, being quadriplegic because they spent 20 minutes in the suit and have 'been there, done that'. Controlling for this outcome might require an advanced form of unknown technology. But if that could be wangled, we might have the means of creating additional nodes of compassion within our social machine that could keep the gears a bit more free of wailing meat.

A practical result of this could be laughing less (see conservation of calories for utilitarians) at the guy with Parkinson's that's unloading your shopping cart into your luxury car, shaking in the rain, or something.

There would definitely need to be built-in mitigation to steer the results away from self-righteousness and toward compassion though. Perhaps some time dilation and mushroom supplements could help.