Why is help often so half-hearted?

I agree with you so much on that one



Well, in the case of designing vehicles, I think you're right. For having a background and environment to fly them it's pretty hard to beat SL.



And I think that was true for the person I did ask, too, and I may have had to mention this to them also: you _are_ still paying for it, because if you didn't have the land, you could have cashed the play money out.

You can own your reactions to other people. You can, in a way, own the people you interact with by choosing who you interact with.

Er, ... nevermind.

Except that they can choose not to interact with me. Which is what they do.

And, Love, yea, ok, I didn't mean THAT

.. Why would I be trying to prove anything?



Well, isn't it always a halfhearted attempt if you give something up because you think you can't do it?

I don't know, but you seem to have an agenda of some sort.



I don't think I can fly either. I'm not about to give it my all from the top of a building. There's diminishing returns at play here. My own level of entertainment is waning, I don't think I can do anything for you, so ...

Well, that I want to be able to have fun by the end?

Sorry, I missed this one.

I haven't been setting you a test. I was saying that setting a "do-or-fail" test is a technique a helper can use. It forces action.

Why do you think that is? Why do people choose not to interact with you? What people, exactly? There's several pages of people interacting with you here in the forum, in this very thread. Is it different inworld?


You have until midnight tonight (SL time) to find your fun otherwise you must logoff for a fortnight.
This is your test. This is your challenge. You must now act!

Go forth, young grasshopper, and try to enjoy yourself.

-Atashi

At the start it would have taken me at least six months to earn enough play money to justify cashing it out: I was basic, with no Paypal, and you needed at least $100 to cut a check... but I could rent land for linden dollars. Later, if I didn't have the land, I wouldn't have had the play money, because I wouldn't have a shop for people who want to buy the cool stuff I make to find it, and keeping track of mall stalls quickly becomes too much like real work.

So choose other people. There's 60,000 people in-world, at least half of them aren't bots, go hunting (soylent) green dots (It's People! Green Dots are Peeee-ople!).

To be blunt, yes The land I have is empty and silent (but, I'm not too surprised by that, because it _is_ empty). I sometimes look for green dots, but they usually turn out to be campsites or generic clubs. But even on the occasions when they aren't, they're people who're happy with the place and environment they're in.. so why would they come to mine, no matter what I made? I have no idea where the people who can't find what they want hang out. And most of my friends just tend to have debates along these lines

Aha!

Is part of the problem that people are ignoring your requests to get them to come to your place and hang out there?

That's something you own. You control your actions and reactions.

You could hang out in their place, instead of trying to make them hang out in yours.

It is impossible to predict with any degree of accuracy what people will do, or why.

Build something you enjoy, something that you want or that would be an interesting challenge to you.

Maybe other people will come, maybe they won't. You can't control that. All you can do is try, and let other people look out for themselves. If your happiness depends solely on the actions of other people, then you have my deepest condolences...

I'm running out of suggestions...

-Atashi

That isn't actually what's happening. But if it was, then "owning my reactions" wouldn't help in this case because I would still like to know why any of my ideas/imagination were being so comprehensively rejected. I could just hang out in their place, but that wouldn't be such fun.

But, no, I'm not making such requests. I'm just not seeing many people who aren't happy where they already are, so there isn't much of a niche for.. well.. anything to be added.

Sweethearts, Franks etc . . . or if they think that only predatory, shy or boring people are to be found there, they come to the Forums to complain about it.

Pep (Build a singles bar - with lots of tables for two, good wine and music)

If everyone thought this way, then we'd have a grid with 30,000 regions but only 60,000 people online. Oh, wait...

-Atashi

Here is my take on all this. When i first came to sl i was like everyone else...clueless. LOL I spent time learning about skins and hair, went shopping, explored. One night i ran into three people in a clothing store and we struck up a conversation. They invited me to come see their land and chat....so i did. Those people helped me understand SL more and really mentored me for several months. I still explored on my own...but i had a place where i felt comfortable going and where i had a couple of friends.

I started decorating homes for friends...just for fun...and people then wanted to pay me for it...cool! Then i went to a discussion on night with only 4 people, but i discovered a wonderful place that i wanted to explore more. I got to know one of the folks at the discussion who was the sim owner. Before long, i had rented an apt there and started hanging out and meeting more people.

Now a year later, i am the biz partner of the sim owner...we have two sims...i have a giant store with my own home decor creations, i teach classes in SL and i do consulting and i love it! I didnt start out knowing that i wanted to do all of that, it all just happened little by little. And some things worked for me and some things didnt. I am horrible at making clothing for instance. But i am really great at using textures.

I think trying to figure it all out before you know what "it" is leads to the OP's level of frustration. Why not just take sl as i comes....go dancing on your own and see if you liek the place...if not, leave. Go listen to a live concert in SL and surf the web at the same time....strike up a conversation with someone just because...and just intend to learn more about them, not to analyze or evaluate their perspectives. Go to a discussion of one of the political or philosophy groups and learn about other's opinions.

For me SL is about making connections with others. Even without my sl "work" i would love just literally bumping into someone and finding out how they like sl and what they do here. For me that is fun and makes being in SL worthwhile.

And you are always invited to come to the Etopia sims...lots to see and do and lots of great people to chat with. like nike says...just DO it. smile

Jojogirl, it's exactly the lack of any equivalent story for me that has me wondering what I did so wrong.

Maybe. But would it be better, were it a whole-hearted attempt that failed?

I don't think it's possible to know whether something is a half-hearted attempt. That's not meant as an abstraction: very practically, here's a thread that's gone on for 100-plus responses, all essentially trying to find some possible path to a happy resolution. Is that half-hearted? Will it be whole-hearted when there are twice as many posts?

Is it only whole-hearted when the helper finally utterly despairs of being able to help anyone else ever again?

Or, what if one of those helpers succeeds without even trying very hard? Just by great luck they utter the magic words and all is well; is that a satisfactory outcome, or is the quality of the help really a simple function of the suffering of the helper? For that matter, is there any success criterion *other* than the depth of the helper's suffering?

That is, is it really help that's expected of the helper, or misery?

An old social model of depression would have it that the depressed individual interacts with others in such a way as to elicit negative responses, which makes the individual more depressed, eliciting more negative responses, etc. This is not a terrifically successful model of clinical depression. But taken in a very narrow and limited sense, perhaps (and only perhaps) it may apply to some set of interactions and relationships here.

yumi hae you done the things i have done? really just strive to make a connection with no agenda or goal other than the connection? if not, try it.

Note your use of past tense here. I'm starting to wonder if you don't want help so much as a post-mortem.

I would want a post-mortem only insofar as learning from my mistakes might help.

They want a chain saw. And a crowd.

When in doubt... I just mash prims together until it looks good. (^_^)y