Second Life: Another Retrospective of the Past Twelve Years

Permalink

Follow me via:

---

Text-to-speech support required

Recently, I wrote about how I was “shutting down” my store and moving on from Second Life, potentially, indefinitely. That much was basically true, and my store still exists as something you can find on the marketplace website (REVOSA)… where all of its sales happen, anyway. And, as my vacation away from my offline job comes to an end, I kind of find myself looking back to how it all started in 2014.

How I was pushed out of a job, because I came out as a trans woman in the workplace … naively. Had you told me this was against my best interest, I might have decided against it. But I didn’t know what I was doing. And, like I’ve detailed numerous times before, this resulted in some of the most horrific treatment I’ve ever been party to, afflicted with, in my entire life. And yes, I got pushed out. I lost that job. They took away my scheduling, my bosses threatened me, HR ignored my pleas.

And this is how we got to Second Life, and building a store in Second Life.

I wish I could find the original video I saw that made me think this was possible, but I’ve just spent the past hour scouring YouTube for it, and have found nothing. But, basically, in the midst of the economic downturn of the 2010s, a woman had lost her job and needed to replace her income. So, she taught herself Blender, and started making shoes. Her store became extremely popular, and an income, she did make.

It’s along the same lines as this, except this video is about Second Life realty.

Unfortunately, if you search for these people in Second Life now you’ll find no mention of them. Not even anywhere on the internet, aside from exactly this video.

But that’s beside the point.

I followed directly in the footsteps of that video I saw. I taught myself Blender, Marvelous Designer, Quixel/zBrush, and so on and so forth. I filled my store with hundreds of different things, and … let’s just say, on a monthly basis for the past twelve years, it’s made me about enough money to Doordash some food once a month.

Which isn’t bad, but it’s not where I needed to be ten years ago.

It’s this … disillusionment I feel. That I couldn’t really do what others did, because the things YouTube failed to mention, was that, in order to make an income as a store owner in Second Life, you have to make specific things that trend among SL shoppers on a regular basis (professionally rigged clothing, and hair, especially), and then hope you get invited to pay a landlord for the privilege of being in one of those extremely popular shopping events (I’ve always seen this as a form of extortion and exploitation).

Without that, you’re just a store existing. And you’ll get sales, but not thousands of dollars a month in sales, like a few handful of people in the virtual world definitely make.

And I’m not saying those people don’t deserve it. But I was basically isolated, dealing with all of these mental health issues I had as this fallout from what that corporation did to me, and it pisses me off, it makes me sad and angry that because I didn’t know those things, and didn’t reach those goals, I had to return to that same job five years later.

Now, twelve years after the beginning of my store, mostly what I feel is sort of numb about the whole ordeal. I’ve learned that life will serve you many injustices and grievances and not only will there be nothing you can do about it, but aggressors, abusers, harassers, and generally unpleasant people will never see any sort of consequences for their behavior or what they’ve done.

There will be no justice.

And I predicate my soft exit of Second Life with those feelings about my store, and the nature in which I built it, and all the friends I made who all quietly disappeared over the years. All except for maybe one person.

I really just look back, and sometimes I wish with everything that’s left of me, that it could have been successful. That I could have made an income, and then a career out of asset development.

Anything.

It would have been better than where I sit right now, because I am the opposite of what I’m supposed to be.