One of the dominant realities of Second Life, is loneliness. I, and I think many other people, came to this place to find people. The world is merely a reflection of the people in it. Hence I have spent many hours wandering empty places, with flashing lights, looking for other people. Worse still is to have a conversation with someone you have known for some time, and realize that underneath they are a monster - hypocritical, vile and base. The aloneness of that moment is so powerful, as your world grows that much smaller, that much less connected. It is funny having a follower of Ayn Rand tell me that I am a "whore" as if it were some kind of insult, which tells me how strange a cult it is. Isn't that their whole thing, exchange of money between consenting adults? (There are further layers of amusement, but I can't reveal them in public.) (Actually I can say one thing, if I had whored my mind and let his silliness pass, I would have gotten money. The whore/john relationship is every where, you can't escape it. While the orifice varies, everyone is paid for having something hard jammed into them while they beg for more.) (This I suppose is why the gentlemen who are clients are sooooo welcome.)
I don't know what the large and great reasons for creating this are. Perhaps there are none, and people merely seek out the warm fire that crowds out the dark and cold night, and then go back off into the night when their face is too flush with heat. I don't know. I do know that that the hanging experience of it pervades our time, and makes us play with pixels rather than face the darkness of our own emptiness.
I have seen terrible visions here, and the confused angers of people who do not know how to find what they want in the real world. I've heard all manner of theories, both rl and sl, as to why the world doesn't work the way we think it ought to. Again, I don't believe any of them, because all of them rest on some other group of people being to blame. It's not a notion that seems to appeal to me. If the world works badly, it is because we ask things of it that have costs, and those costs are more than we can bear, but we pay them, because we cannot bear not to have a chance at our other dreams.
After spending a great deal of time and effort building a club which is going to remain empty, I think, it seems to me that the thing we fear most, is having someone stand in our way. Instead we go through a great deal of trouble getting in our own way, in order to avoid this other thing we fear.
What, you may ask, has this all to do with sex. It is the heart of why sexualization is so frequent here. Not necessarily the sex act, but the exageration of feminity and masculinity, the roles, the coquetterie, the bluntness of approaches, the men bumping into women in their eagerness to introduce themselves.
Sex, by being without all of the mind, removes the alienation possible from our strange obessions and cults of our time. Politics, even real art, are pushed aside in favor of totems which, by being empty, allow us to make connection without the offense of our public and private cults.
People who study languages call each person's individual understanding of their own language their "idiolect." We also, I think, have our won idio- society and idio- reality. That SL makes it possible to show these, in some communicable form, is part of its appeal.
But that only works if there are other people. And hence camping and all the other games to get traffic. Why is it that we have built a fantasy land, and then have to pay to make people come?
Hey, Lillie... =-]
ReplyDeleteI think the thing that brings us to SL is one of a handful of things. One is simple curiosity while another is the desire to seek out others and fill the needs missing in RL. Many find shelter in SL because of the personal interactions and freedoms it provides.
Those first few days are always rich with exploration and learning, but there is also the fear that you don't know anyone. You don't have anyone to share the experience with. Eventually, you do find someone to spend your time with, and you latch on to them as your SL liferaft.
Eventually, you broaden out and seek to make more friends and have more experiences. The loneliness thing creeps in ocassionally, but as long as you make it an active point to be social, you should have nothing to worry about. Every person has something they're good at doing. Most are willing to share their knowledge because most people are kind-at-heart. SL allows people to exhibit their more True Self and most people are genuinely NICE.
For those who are lonely and do not have high-end social graces. My best advice would be to sit back and observe. I was not always the Alpha Male I strive to be today (SL/RL). I was once a guy who had NO clue how to talk with women or how to present myself in such a manner as to be deemed "appealing". I decided to sit back and watch people as they interact. Look at males who did a great job of attracting women. What traits did they have (aside from looks) that allowed them to be successful. Also, one of these guys, who is a good friend of mine today took me under his wing to teach me. Find yourself a mentor, someone who is willing to show you how it's done.
SL grants you the ability to become your vision of yourself without the need for exercise or diet. This draws the opposite sex to you. However, what's behind the mask is what truly lets you sink your teeth in. Without the proper interactive graces, you will falter. You will remain lonely. But, remember... "There are no failures, merely delayed successes" (Isaac Asimov).
Your day will come. If you commit to truly making an effort to combat the loneliness and learn proper interactions, and you will not be one of the random "noobs" bloggers write about (lol). ;-]
Hello Stone,
ReplyDeleteThere is a great deal of very good advice in your comment: be social, learn from others, get to people's true self, and realize that it is your true self that shines through in the end.
SL is a game of people, not a game of things, and it seems that when people fail at the game of people, they go back to creating things.
But what I'm writing about is a more pervasive kind of loneliness, the one which makes people withhold much of themselves, and stay in the cliques they form once they have them. It's why when a place forms that breaks through that, people are drawn to it, and stay there.
It is that loneliness which presses in from the edges, a kind of cold dark that is everywhere in SL. I think because so much of sl is actually empty, kilometers of rotating for sale signs, interspersed with attempts to create community. It seems to me that sprawl is one of the things that is strangling people in sl.
Lillie Yifu
I apologize for missing your point.
ReplyDeleteIt is true that "the sprawl" is ever-present here. In SL, people always think they can make the next "place-to-be". There is far more involved than just opening your doors, raising your hands and screaming "We're open!". As a shop-owner and a PR Manager, I have seen how hard it is first-hand. It is better to start small and expand than start big and not meet your own expectations unless you have alot of money to throw at it.
But, yes... this dilution of the SL space is causing lots of free-range Sims with ghostly shells rising from the ground, exhibiting peoples' dreams and aspirations that never quite reach fruition. It is to those people- havens they flock to, these epicenters of community that seem to flourish amidst the emptiness.
Hmmm, I should have written better. But that's a blog, mistakes disappear off the bottom.
ReplyDeleteYes, that ghost dance at the margins is what I am thinking of, even as I am probably contributing to it by building Yedo.
To be frank I cannot understand why people would think SL would be different from RL. People are still animals, when the rules that govern behavior are removed they live down to their baser instincts. They grab for power money and sex and the ability to lord what they have over others. When they are hurt it makes them more hurtful rather than more compassionate. Kissing up and kicking down seem to be the order of the day.
ReplyDeleteWell Munnin, that's why the good people are so much more precious. Both you and stone are good people, and I'm glad you both are taking time out from your busy day's to comment on my little blog.
ReplyDelete