Who are the happiest residents in SL?

It's true. I get a lot of satisfaction out of bending prims and slapping textures on 'em. I do it jes for fun, relly. That some people choose to pay money for those creations? That's jes ike icing!

Mari

I totally agree. I seriously enjoy rezzing my Red Rubber Ball™ in the Kuula sandbox and just kicking it around until it gets autoreturned. After I found that I can use llApplyForce to make it 'lighter' without reducing the mass by making it Hollow, I've become addicted to it. (^_^)y

Ooh, dis is a trick I gotta learn. Want any help kickin it about?

Happiness is a relative term is it not?
For me, I am more at peace with myself doing certain things but not necessarily happier but definitely not unhappy...did I say that right?

You bring the marshmallows, I'll cut the sticks!

I think that *for the most part*, the happiest folks in SL are the happiest folks in RL, and it's mostly due to brain chemistry but strongly affected by life habits.

However, as pointed out above, there's an important exception for those people who get an outlet in SL for deeply seated aspects that they don't allow themselves to express in RL.

I look at the money I spend in SL as part of my entertainment budget for the month. This includes my tier payments, and operation costs for my fight league. If I make a bit of money on the side, it's just lovely, but not the reason I do this at all.

I'm pretty happy.

Happiness is subjective and varies from person to person. Also, happiness does not necessarily equal "contentment" which I find a much more stable state of mind - RL & SL.

I originally came to SL as a 3D enhancement to my IRC community. Once here I discovered so many interesting places to go and things to do.

I was very fortunate to meet a partner who has similar interests and expectations from SL.

We have no interest in owning land nor making SL our "job" (although we have begun building and selling for fun).

Our happiness and contentment is derived from exploring SL together, never knowing what adventure may be around the next bend.

QFT

Personally I can create things here which I couldn't RL. My family background is a bunch of artists where I can't draw a straight line with a ruler. So yes maybe that's true - that IS missing from my RL.

Plus none of my lot could do it no matter how nicely they can draw and paint. HA!!!!

Czari, you also ring bells for me, SL is very much like IRC 3D. Been back to IRC? How depressing.

(Plus I do wonder who I know here who I might have encountered on Dal, Bondagenet et al ... also depressing!)

Yes

I'm super happy in SL.... I don't think there is a 'happiest group of people' in SL who do a specific set of things.. it's the individuals that are happiest for their OWN reasons.

I'm a builder, and absolutely love it, and don't do it for money. I do it for me, and for friends when asked sometimes.

I'm an amateur scripter, same deal as above... it's fun to learn how to do things is all.

I'm a submissive, now Owned (YAAAAAAAAAAAAY!), and love it, because my SL is my RL to me. I really feel close to my Mistress, and Love Her tons and such. It's part of who I am.

I also own 10km of land, and love that, because it gives me a place to call my own. I buy L$ with USD, don't have an SL job (I might someday, just not yet this time around), and am fine with that.

Now..this is my recipe for happiness. For everyone, it's gonna be different.

I'm sure that that's basically been said in this thread, but oh well... yay.

(x) Yes, I am happy with SL.

Reasons for happiness:

1) A quiet, mainland sim with no ban lines, ad farms, ugly builds or malls. The neighbors I do have are oldbies and nothing is for sale within 256 m of my home.

2) A dozen or so builds that I can tinker around with and still have 2000 prims left.

3) A line of merchandise that pays my tier with some left over for toys.

4) My SL partner is my RL wife and we enjoy SL together.

5) A good enough computer so that I rarely experience problems.

I have always used SL more as a creative outlet rather than a social platform, but I do have some great friends to visit and share with. I don't take the whole thing too seriously, never have. It's still just a hobby and I'm lucky if I spend 20 hours a week on building or exploring. (down from the 60-80 when I first started). Sitting on my front porch watching the sunrise over the water still knocks me out.

I'm very interested by this thread because it ties into a question I asked at the forum cartel at once time, which is:

Should newbies be allowed to choose to be _forced_ to build/create?

Note that it's still a choice for them, so people who have no interest at all in it can skip it. Others could, for example, be sent to a closed sandbox island which they can only leave when they've made something. (Of course, if they want to bail out, they can create an alt.)

I know that at first glance this might seem a pretty ridiculous thing to suggest but the case for it is: there is probably a non-zero number of people who would only try building/creating if they were forced, and of those people probably a number of them would turn out, in the end, to enjoy it. If a tiny push of force near the start of their SLs makes the difference between someone who becomes inspired to create what they love, and someone who would otherwise have dropped SL within a few weeks as "just a talker", then isn't it worth doing? (Especially if it's made optional, so that nobody actually loses anything?)

/me waves

That story sounds familiar. If I am the new player in question, you left out the part where I spent 20 minutes of your time trying to figure out how to use a texture organizer bc/ I had no idea what I was doing.

I've been back to IRC a few times to say hi to some friends. A LARGE group of people who were part of the particular IRC community I was in have now migrated to SL - usually with the same first names and the surname added. I run into more and more people I knew on IRC regularly.

There are some people (perhaps many people) who are in SL for the pure social aspects of it.

When I worked at a dance club and read profiles, most of the groups I saw were all about dancing clubs and shopping.

The profiles of my rp friends list primarily groups associated with that particular rp.

SL is a big enough venue for people to explore whatever they wish.

If I had been told I "had" to build when I first came to SL, I would have left quickly. I did not stay on AW because I joined when it first started and the place was like a wasteland and I was told I had to build a house.

NOW that I have been on SL almost a year, my interest in building has been piqued. So, what one starts out to do in SL can change and morph over time.

I'm pretty much opposed to anyone being forced to do much of aything. I would not have likely been comfy with such when I was new.

Mari

That's why I said, it would be a choice to be forced or not.

It might seem a bit contradictory to offer a choice of being forced, but in fact it can be valuable on those activities where positive freedom can be an issue. Having the choice of being forced allows conscious long-term desires to trump subconscious short-term ones or willpower difficulties. (For example, in the real world, there are many people who - offered the option - would choose to be forced to lose weight.)

_I_ would like to have been forced to build, for one thing, and it would have been my choice

Well..it's to choose to be forced to.. so..you...bah.. I dun get it

Maybe newbies should be forced to a closed island to learn how to make friends. They can learn to build later, but if they can't get along socially, they can't leave the island.

Naaaahhh.

You can't choose to be forced to do something. If you choose it, then you weren't forced. If you were forced, you have no choice. People need to learn to do whatever they want at their own pace. I've been working on learning to build, but it's going really slowly because I'm taking my time and doing it in small chunks so I don't get bored or burned out. I'm happy with my pace. Why force me to speed it up just so I can get off the island and play with my friends?

As for happiness, I think the happiest people are those who have found their niche and are enjoying it without taking themselves too seriously. Desmond's niche is not mine, but he seems to be very happy and obviously doesn't take himself so seriously that he can't smile, crack jokes and show kindness to others. My niche obviously isn't for aome others (I have the PM's to prove it, lol) but it makes me happy and I love the time I spend in SL or here. It's just a matter of finding out what and who you love and concentrating on that.

Again, did you see my example above? People might well, in real life, choose to be forced to lose weight. Yes, it's paradoxical. But it's just as paradoxical that people will talk about how much they want to lose weight but then go ahead eating chocolate.

By having the choice to be forced, they can defeat that paradox. At the moment when they are standing on the scales, they choose; at the moment when they reach for the chocolate bar, their minder grabs them and they are forced away. They both choose, and are forced, at different times; but with regard to the same thing, and with complete congruence.

Positive Freedom is an absolutely _fascinating_ thing.

No, really, you can't choose to be forced to do something, and no clever wording can change that. You can, however, be presented with a choice that has unpalatable consequences if you make the wrong choice - such as choosing not to lose weight resulting in various illnesses. That is still a choice though, as one could still choose either path and just accept the consequences. Your example above is not choosing to be forced; it's choosing then changing your mind and then being forced - the choice and the forcing do not occur contemporaneously.

Again, I will state that you can. If I am fortunate enough to have a minder of that kind and I want to lose weight, I can instruct him to physically restrain me from eating fatty foods unless I specifically say to him, "I choose to give up my plans to lose weight."

That is not the same as simply choosing to lose weight, because it bypasses any lack of willpower I might experience. If I am a weak-willed person I might have been unable to lose weight without being forced, thus being forced enables me to make that choice and _increases_ my freedom.



Nope. Again, human behavior can be paradoxical and it is entirely possible for people to continue eating chocolate while intending to lose weight. Just as schoolchildren can continue playing Super Death Race 5000 for hours while intending to become rocket scientists. You cannot assume that just because a person is doing a particular behaviour, that they have chosen it. If that were true then amongst other things, many mental illnesses could not exist.

I disagree entirely. If a person continues to eat unhealthily and do no exercise, then they do not intend to lose weight, and never did intend to lose weight. They may have claimed that they intended to lose weight, but if they mean't it they would do it. It's the same with smoking; people who try to quit and fail, fail because they don't really want to quit.

I agree that fee will is a myth. What I suggest is that not only are people not entirely able to control their behaviour, they are also not entirely able to form meaningful intentions in many cases. A person with no willpower who "intends" to lose weight but then goes back on their intention invalidates the original intention.

I got to agree in some cases with Lee about some people have empty spaces that are filled here, not everyone but some of us get to experience new things and make connections we don't have available to us in our real lives....
I know in my own real life I am very ill, experience lot of limitations and I get to have experiences that have led me to feel happier in both lives that I would have never expected from virtual world.

I spent a short time working customer service for a large insurance company several years ago. It was one of those situations where the company I had been working for as a systems administrator folded and closed its doors. I needed to quickly get back to work, but wasn’t sure if I wanted to stay in the IT industry, so I took the first job that did not require me to ask “do you want fries with that order?” I found costumer service to be very rewarding. It was fast paced with lots of people who had lots of problems and each call that came in required that I listen carefully to the caller and determine what the problem was and how best to resolve it.
Now fast forward to present. I’m happily back in good ol boring IT and that insurance company closed its call centers and moved them out of the USA. I’m also in this thing called Second Life where lots of people have lots of problems and they really appreciate anyone who will carefully listen and try to help them out.
I plant myself at Help Island or one of the Welcome Areas and get hammered by IMs and question while getting spammed with noisy obnoxious gestures and lagging all to hell…and I’m in nirvana.