Overcoming Obsession with Things in Second Life

I don't think there is a single person who creates their first avatar and DOESN'T go Free-Shopping crazy. :) It's just what we do. We check in, we get our first shapes and bodies and clothes and we think we are SOOOOO great looking! Heels, gowns, pants, shirts, vehicles, furniture, games, dresses, jeans...omg the list is ENDLESS. At first, we think so highly of all of these freebies and we can't wait to go shopping for more. As we spend more time in SL, we find these free things are pretty lame compared to the stuff you can get that's better made, better designed, better looking in general. There's where the obsession over THINGS can come in.

I personally have an affinity for lovely things. I would like nothing more to live in a brick cottage by the ocean - you know, one of those Tudor style buildings, and fill it with polished tables and the kind of couches and chairs you sink into. I would like a piano of course (even though I can barely bang out Heart and Soul) and I would like incredibly breathtaking rugs and silver bowls filled with fresh flowers. Everything would look like it came out of a magazine and everything would smell like a combination of lemon wood polish, freshly mown grass, old (but not musty) wood and slight undertones of sweet-smelling pipe tobacco. :) Instead, my house in RL usually smells like dog and a faint odor of whatever meal I last cooked. Oh, and probably some faint undertones of coffee.

One of the things I enjoy doing in SL is decorating...making things look pretty gives me a certain kind of peace and comfort. I enjoy it because it becomes an escape. I can leave the dirty dishes behind and look at flowing curtains (which I love) instead of mini-blinds (which I don't really care for). I can look at white poofy couches that never get dirty from puppy paws and crayons or markers rather than my own mossy-shaded couch with the constantly spinning wooden foot that has the screw threads broken on it. A week ago when I was baking all those muffins for E.'s school, I stayed up until O-Dark-Thirty and I was on SL just putting things inside little spaces in my dining room - on my china hutch and in my large bookcase. Little framed pictures of friends, a silver bowl, vases, crystal... all just prim wasters in some people's minds - but for me, each piece I put down made me smile. No one tells me how I can and can't decorate in SL. No one says "no open blinds, no plants, no candles, no breakables" and so I just go nuts - adding more and more things that I love. And then I look at it and I smile. I don't feel as if I have accomplished anything significant other than making a little space in my life look a little more beautiful. But in a way, that's enough.

At one point in SL, I was pretty obsessed with things. Hair - omg, I could go on and on about the hair. I couldn't stop shopping for hair! As much as I liked making my surroundings look good, Crystallyn was the biggest part of my surroundings - so she had to ALWAYS look impeccable...and hair is a big part of that. Damselfly, Tiny Bird, Magika, TRUTH, every type of hair designer - I would look at "hair fairs" and swap good hair Landmarks with friends. The nice thing about hair is that it's almost always CHEAP. Even the best quality hair at Damselfly can be bought for only 250L. Then there was skin...I didn't change my skin very often - until recently when I made a new friend (a shape designer) who taught me all about body shapes and skins. We would spend time going shopping for killer-sale skins. It was great...being able to change your appearance with a single click...tanned skin or skin as white as ivory - whichever type you felt like wearing. I was never one to change my body style very often. I think I have only had two or three my entire time in SL. I liked how my shape looked from the start. AND, besides that, I was a little afraid of getting in too deep with the skin/body thing because of something that happened to me early-on in my SL experience.

I think it was maybe my fourth month in and I was getting ready to go out to a club event with a couple of my closest friends. I was getting rapid-fire notices from the club that the theme was "Hot or Not" that night. I decided I would go dressed as "not" - and I figured I would dig deep into my freebie selection to accomplish that. I decided I would try some sort of masculine nerd look. I started going through all my folders and found one called "Paul" - at four months into SL, I knew just enough about it to be dangerous and not enough to take the precautions in advance to make sure if I ever lost my skin or shape by accident, I could find them again. Well, sometimes icons in folders look like one thing when they are actually another. This was something I wasn't really clear on yet. I went into that Paul folder and clicked on striped pants. OMG, they were hideous. I grabbed the shirt to go with them. Then I took off my hair (I was planning to go bald) and I clicked on something that just said "Paul" and HOLY COW...my entire shape and skin changed! Gone was pretty Crystallyn and in her place stood a HUGE AFRICAN AMERICAN MAN WITH A 'FRO. I almost cried I was so shocked, but I decided to laugh at myself instead. What else can you do when something like that happens? I gave myself a last-once-over and teleported to the club where my friends were already dancing. We all laughed until we almost wet our pants. It was just hysterical. I started talking like some of the men that run around in SL with amorous intentions but who have a bit of a language barrier when it comes to speaking English. These were the kinds of guys I ran into early-on in my Second Life experience, generally in noob areas. They would say things like "Hey pretty girl, you are fine, yes?" and "You want my body, yes?" Well, I imitated them and everyone in the club who had experiences with these types of guys themselves just erupted into laughter and even the host and DJ were cracking up. It was one of the funniest experiences I had in SL and it was a total accident - then I looked at the clock and realized I was about 10 minutes from having a meeting with some very serious friends who wanted to discuss organizing some events in the sim I lived in. OMG. Fear and panic struck me. I had NO IDEA how to get back to looking like Crystallyn. I don't think I ever got back to looking JUST like I did before that day...but eventually I looked even better...so I guess in the long run, it was a lesson - and a funny one at that!

I did have a problem with obsessing over hearing back from builders or creators when I bought something that I was not pleased with. If it broke or looked funky or I accidentally lost it, I would wait and wait and wait and tap my little virtual foot (and sometimes my real foot) - waiting to hear back and get my repaired/recreated item. Several times I commissioned items to be made just by my specifications. Nothing too earth-shattering, a couple of wardrobes/closets, a swing,a couch...and a house once. I just know what I like and I want what I like - and SL offers that to people. But there were times I felt I was going overboard. Once I saw something, I had to have it. For me, it might have been hair or a Dinner Party Kitchen. For others, it can be more dark and frightening items. There are things you can buy in SL that would curl your hair...and then straighten it back.

Obsession with things just basically extends the time you spend in SL. You spend more and more time there because you don't realize that you will never buy enough things to have everything just perfect. There are always new things and new looks, new hair and new kitchens. You have to walk away to realize that spending real money on things that don't exist seems just a little silly. Of course, it leaks out to other places now. The Virtual Goods market is exploding in places like Facebook now where people spend REAL money on crops and buildings for their farm in Farmville or super-cute clothes for their animals in Petville.

Thankfully, I have been able to easily say NO to buying virtual items anywhere except SL. But I have several good friends who have farms on Facebook that they are absolutely proud of that may have cost them somewhere on the order of $30 USD or even more. It's absolutely their right and their choice to do it, and if you think about it, $30 over an extended period of time wouldn't amount to much more than a coffee drink at Starbucks a few times over. If they want to skip having a cup of coffee and build a chicken coop, GO TO IT! It only becomes a problem when obsession rears its ugly head. Just don't think you can make obsession look better by adding some Damselfly hair and Pretty Feet heels to it. It just doesn't work that way.

I am a huge Weird Al fan. I admit it. I am reminded of this song - very Real Life though, and not so Second Life. In Second Life, you CAN have whatever you want. In Real Life you have to be a bit more realistic. You can always count on Al to give us realistic when we need it.