R. M. Pirsig talks about this in relation to being a celebrity – “You split into two people, who they think you are and who you really are, and that produces Zen hell.” I don’t know if that schism is really ‘Zen hell’, but when the external perception feels strong, then the tension can be too much for people. How to live authentically without alienating yourself from those around you is a real conundrum. Heading off into the middle of nowhere is not such a bad idea though – it worked for Thoreau. I don’t know if it will provide a lasting solution though.

I’m certian that your experience of the virtual world is familiar to many people. I also used to spend a lot of time on MSN and in chatrooms when I was younger. Like you, I found this to be addictive. I remember being in chatrooms on sunny weekends – sunny, in England! I stopped after a while though. I suppose what I was searching for was a kind of authenticity, and I found that the virtual world of second lives didn’t have that.

For me, the ideal situation is if your virtual life and real life are more or less congruent. I realise that not everybody can achieve this though, and not everybody wants to. Having a virtual self can be liberating, and some people are happy co-existing between the two worlds. If you are not happy though, you could try bridging the gap between the real and the virtual. You could try creating virtual spaces and introducing elements of the real world into them. This blog could be seen as an example of such a space, as it is open to my friends & family in the ‘real’ world.

These are just my ideas. I’d be curious to hear what other people think.

I will first comment on the hypocrisy argument. I live in hypocrisy everyday.

Things I hate:
Capitalism
Money
Time
The system

Things I do:
Shop and buy brands
Work
Set alarms
Don’t protest or demonstrate.

I’m a vegetarian and have volunteered for environmental charities, but nothing more. What is holding me back? It’s a pessimistic realisation that I cannot change anything. Ideally the world would change. There’d be huge redistribution and abolition of the capitalist system as we know it.

But, instead, my family nag me to work and demand that I do. My friends carry on as normal. So, the way I act is to make the best of a bad world. Rather than feel pressure and anxiety at trying to be different I dress in labels, I listen and read about trendy music and films, I pay vast amounts of money to footballers and I fly.

It almost seems I have no choice. I cannot function in my family, in my life, without aspiring to a job and home ownership. If there was revolution I’d be at the front of the pack with a rifle, but that is not going to happen. So, until then my only option seems to be to carry on as normal, or turn my back on everything and go and live on my own in the middle of nowhere in the USA, for example, and have as little interaction with the world and the system as possible.

This conflict between what you believe in and want to do, and, what everyone around you expects and demands you to also spreads into the discussion on the virtual world and virtual self.

What does interest me about it though is my own personal experience of the attraction of the virtual world, and the internal battles it creates.

I have co-existed the on-line and real world now for more than 7 years. This started around the age of 16 and onwards. At that time, the real world was not great. I didn’t realise it at the time, but looking back now I can see it was pretty damn awful and miserable. During the last 3 years of school, I looked about 12 so couldn’t go out anywhere, was unpopular so never got invited many places, and until the last year lacked friends. So, always being at home on Fridays and Saturdays I became a good live in baby sitter for my younger brothers. Thus, Friday and Saturday nights I would spend hours at a time in chat rooms, living a second life.

This had it’s downsides, it did change my brain, the artificialness of it, the obvious sexual nature of many internet activities. I became addicted to it without realising.

This has continued since then and I lead numerous lives on numerous fora, social networking and other such sites. These have severely compromised much of my real life. I have a constant struggle to keep the two very separate, very few people in the real world know anything about what things I have said to, done with etc with people from the cyber-world.

No one I have met in real life has ever seen my Myspace page. And other fora, sports, music, emotional, adult etc are the same, an anonymous user name and again, precautions taken to keep it secret.

This activity damages relationships. Some examples:

1)A few years back rather than socialise with flat mates I would lie and say I had work to do, and just go to my room to go into the on-line world. The real people asked questions, and thought it strange. They were insulted.

2) One Christmas, and one New Years I spent a lot of time away from friends and family to speak to two people, one on MSN and one on the phone. These were people I met on-line, and never in real life. But I loved them. I haven’t spoken to them for more than 2 years and I think about at least one of them every day.

One of these two refused to be a friend on Facebook, as that was for her real friends only. It threw me, I was very angry and it contributed to the events that stopped us ever talking. Now, someone else has transcended that boundary towards me – someone from Myspace is now a Facebook friend, and I am always scared real friends will ask about them and think it odd. Yet I can’t delete them as I know how that affected me!

3) I spent one year in a real proper relationship with a friend of a friend. We lived a long way apart so much of our communication was on line. It reached the stage where I couldn’t resist entering my on-line world at the same time as speaking to my partner on line. It ended with me neglecting them, giving short sharp replies whilst spending ages reading and writing in the on-line realm. This created the atmosphere that made them decide to leave me.

This post is a prime example. Very few people will know who I am. Some will, and some will guess, but these are people I am allowing to know.

Recently, as I have more time and less happiness, I have spent more time in the virtual world, and the prospect of returning to a proper functional adult life, as expected and demanded of me seems a distance away as a result.

I based this firm decision on an ecological basis, so wouldn’t classify my self as something vague in this regard.

Oh, watch this:

Although my friends will not be shocked, and will be considerate, I am much more concerned by the strangers there. Due to their own drunkenness their memory of me may be fading already, especially if they return to the real world as you describe – unless any photographs emerge to display my image in the public domain for eternity.

I know how the celebrities we both love and hate must feel!