Take a look at Tom Campbell on YouTube. Your outlook is too narrow. Yes, we could be living in a simulation, but NASA is too. Everyone might be just a character in a video game being played by some unknown entity (not NASA). According to Tom Campbell we all have free will and all our circumstances are probabilistic. It's all just a roll of the dice. If Tom Campbell's notion is true I don't know whether to be comforted or afraid.
OK... trying to stay on topic "the beliefs on this board..." LCS (large consciousness systems) are one of the beliefs on this board so I think we can safely explore it in this thread. No one wants to be sent to the lower fora because the walls there are smeared with feces, blood and it smells bad.
I saw some of Tom Campbell's videos and he's exploring some ideas that our reality is a virtual reality of some larger consciousness. There are other physicists that also talk about our existence being a simulation. He does a good job of approaching it scientifically and has some compelling arguments. Many FE Youtubers spend their clicks trying to disprove RE rather that laying out reproducible tests to prove FE. Also LCS theories don't call for the assumption of a global conspiracy involving millions of people.
But anytime I look at a theory that creates a frame of reference so large to include all possible frames of reference, there is a point where you reach the unknowable. If we establish that everything knowable is a work of something beyond what's knowable, we can endow that larger consciousness with whatever qualities we choose.
Is the large consciousness good or evil?
Is its name God, Allah or Seymour? Maybe it's a musical doo-op group...
What's its agenda?
Then some a-hole like me can come along and propose that the entire LCS and its creator are just a dream in the mind of a sleeping dog.
Still, given the strange quantum relationship between the observer and the observed, I'm not going to dismiss this theory as I would the 'dome' theory.