I run when the sun is lower in the sky because of skin cancer risk. For 6 months of the year, it's low enough that it isn't an issue any time of day. I also wear a hat and long sleeved shirt. I know this works because I don't have a tan. I've never been bitten by a mosquito when running, it's when I stop they get me.
As for it being boring, I zone out and work on my projects in my head when running.
Not sure why you'd bother with a spread with a view if you don't enjoy it.
And what about your eyes? How healthy is wearing VR? :)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-talk-tv-eye...
Sure, if you have a CRT strapped to your face, there might be a little risk. But an LCD screen is just about the most harmless thing imaginable for your eyes.
(And, of course, there's the fact that no one has ever been able to reproduce a study on CVS... also not giving it a very strong case.)
I do all of my daily programming with it on, there are a bunch of applications to watch movies with IMAX-size screens with it on in multiplayer-synced virtual theaters, there are a surprising amount of full-motion sports, plenty of applications built around socialization including a bunch of games, and it's incredibly easy to develop applications for: It's just an Android device as far as software goes, and as of last year it uses the industry-standard OpenXR, so you don't really need to know much specific to the headset at all.
The only thing you can't do completely standalone that's mentioned in that comment is use that particular Linux-in-RISC-V-emulator-in-pixel-shader-in-VRChat, but that's sort of an edge case, as you can probably imagine. For that sort of thing, the Quest 2 works really well for PCVR, as long as you're not using a very specific configuration of Linux (Linux/Nvidia), or a Mac.
But yeah, the future is basically now.
VR is great. You don't have to spike your risk of skin cancer, you don't have to deal with allergies, you don't have to run along a road that constantly has drunken teenagers crashing into mailboxes, there are no mosquitos that will make your life miserable, and you can play with friends, regardless of the fact that they're traveling, or live elsewhere. You don't have to deal with motion sickness as you're driving to a more interesting location, and you don't have to comply to the schedule of your immediate environment.
But none of that is quite as important as what really matters: The real world is boring. If the parts accessible to everyone were half as interesting as a world defined in silicon, people wouldn't strap an LCD screen onto their face and spend all day in it.
$300 for a device that you can do your work in, watch movies with friends in, play pretty intensive, full-motion e-sports in, meet new people every single night without having to pay a cover fee in, and program your own world around your preferences in is a hell of a deal.
These things are popular because the real world sucks in comparison for 80% of the population. Not everyone's a dotcom bubble millionaire, not everyone attends any university, let alone a good one, not everyone lives in the suburbs or in an urban environment.
It's more fun to see someone stand up on a virtual stage and give a presentation to eighty people on something that wouldn't be significant in real life, like a mainline Linux kernel running in a written-for-this-talk RISC-V emulator inside of a pixel shader inside of the video game you're currently standing in's virtual world[1] than it ever could be to watch birds.
I have one of the best views imaginable in real life, with as much land as a person could want to mess around with vehicles, run, or make impromptu sleds to see how fast you can go down a steep hill without toppling, and it doesn't hold a candle to VR. Most of my hours spent outside now are based in running with my pet or walking through the woods, because there's no point in going outside every day for its own sake. If it weren't for my pet, I probably wouldn't spend more than an hour outside every day.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2u7NOpzcBQ&t=5054s