Get a (Second) Life

I read an article this week that was written six years ago on the effect of the game "Second Life" on people's actual lives. Research had been done which showed that within 90 seconds of portraying your 'character,' impressions could be made that would carry over into real life. The article also brought up games such as World of Warcraft which has even more subscribers than Second Life (not to mention, WOW costs money to subscribe)! The researcher was looking to find the positives in his research - if watching your avatar workout for five minutes motivated you to workout, then the possibilities would be endless. 

There are a few problems here, I think, that may go overlooked. My first one is the rant that I've been on in several of my assignments, and perhaps is beginning to bother our professor (sorry!). We're moving more and more towards a culture that is obsessed with themselves. Combined with our laziness to actually improve ourselves and our lack of self-esteem comes this new type of self - what appears to be self-esteem is actually a desperate cry of self-loathing and feelings of inadequacy. I don't believe masking ourselves in games such as these is beneficial. I believe the problem becomes even more deep rooted than before. We take the entitlement we (feel we) deserve online and transport it to everyday life. Then, we're either completely oblivious to the fact that we don't look at all like we do online, or we're constantly haunted by it. I would argue that the latter happens more often, but both are negative. 

Our false selves haunt us because we're afraid we can never be as good as them.

God forbid our online selves don't get enough attention or we're really in for it.

I think it comes down to this - if advertisers can convince us that life isn't a real experience because it's not as good as we thought it would be (or we're not as pretty, tough, or whatever as we thought we would be), they can sell us a false reality. Everything is better online because you can be whoever you want to be - "freedom." And yet, our bank accounts and days spent show that we are slaves to the very system set up to make us feel good about ourselves. So we spend money to be a part of a world that is only a fraction as beautiful as the one we could be a part of if we simply stepped away from the computer and lived. 

The enemy knows that comparison will rob of us joy, and potentially, lead us to withdraw from reality altogether. 

I believe that at the heart of this may just be the fact that we're told as kids that we're special and it's implied that the world revolves around us. This simply isn't true and we hit that hard truth as adults. This, I'm afraid, is what drives us by the millions to embrace other lives where we can be the special, important, award-winning, muscular, tan, beautiful person we thought we were meant to be all along.



It's got to stop being all about us.

Bibliography

Dell, Kristina. "How Second Life Affects Real Life." Time. Time Inc., 12 May 2008. Web. 12 Sept. 

       2014.