Back last spring, I came to the realization that most of the people I enjoyed playing Secondlife with no longer played. Some intermittently still came on, but I found myself tuning out SecondLife while playing other games.
Other than occasionally talking to Justin about music or comics, there were very few people to talk to normally anymore, and it was getting worse. I started thinking about leaving then but resisted because I was stubborn.
Secondlife became a place where you could log in and hear somebody have a breakdown or watch relationships fall apart in a loud and public way.
For four or five years now, Secondlife became a weirdly competitive platform where people were unbelievably horrible to each other. My strategy became being more terrible than whoever was awful to my friends. Unfortunately, I got pretty good at that.
Battling pretty bad people by being worse became how almost everyone played SecondLife. Gone were the avenues for creativity in the world of SecondLife. You could visit some pretty cool builds, but most paled to anything done in Unreal Engine.
By May, I became pretty determined to dramatically reduce my time on Secondlife; by June, I was logging in once or twice a week, and by July, I was gone.
It was the right decision. SecondLife makes you petty and mean if you're around it enough. Even if you escape that, you're still going to witness good people suffer and break down, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Honestly, I wish I'd given it up three or four years ago. The things I've witnessed in those years were not pleasant. SecondLife became dominated by miserable people, making me unhappy too.
I still care about a few people in the game, but I can care about them without being in SecondLife. It's impossible to shield them from the toxicity dominating the game, but it's their choice to be in it. I'm choosing not to.
