People are strange?

Thought finally I should post something I thought was quite enlightening regarding all these people (myself included) who seem to have been a bit sucked into all these MMORPG things on the fabulous Internet. The strange thing called community spirit.

Now I have to admit to being fairly antisocial on these sorts of games as in all honesty I thought most are sort of weird dedicating chunks of their daily lives to the endless pursuit of killing orcs and goblins in a never ending stream of ultimately fruitless behaviour. Now my excuse is I can't bear to watch TV and have the attention span of a newt these days so hence I try to find new and supposedly interesting things to do. Unfortunately my whole mental set up has been to generally get pleasure and satisfaction out of helping others rather than bothering too much about anything else.

Therefore that's sort of how my career (of sorts) is and possibly why I don't really get much satisfaction out of hobbies in general because they generally are self indulgent things. Now I have come across all these people who just have fun helping people through the game without much regard to anything else. It's a bit like being someone constantly helping old folks cross the road/counsellor/agony aunt/big brother and now I realise the addictiveness isn't the game as sorts it's the community.

And what a nice bunch of people that are out there and for some reason I get more thanks and appreciation from a complete bunch of strangers who have never met me and are unlikely too than I do from most of the random strangers I meet in day to day life. This has struck me as somewhat twisted. Are people more reserved in real life or just confused as to why someone is willing to offer assistance without regard and are somehow cynical through the harshness of society or are people who play these games just 'nicer'.

An example that spurred me to comment on this was being called the most eloquent,intelligent and helpful person the individual in question had the pleasure to meet through a game. I can't remember ever being called intelligent and eloquent in the same sentence before then, and certainly not after helping the last person across the road in real life, all they did was grunt at me. They were blind though and might have thought I was really a mugger in our scary mixed up world. I had a good mind to nick his white stick though but my good nature means the most I could do was mumble back 'no problem' the ungrateful sod....

So to conclude we need to sort out our community spirit and take a reality check on the world. Remove our cynical ways and have faith in society again, nice people exist, do not be scared of accepting help, there are no motives other than feeling good about helping. Life isn't about clawing your way to the top it's about being the foundation of our society giving those a leg up who need it. Take away the kind souls and you will have nobody to support you and ultimately you'll fall flat on your face with nobody to either catch you or help put the pieces back together when you need it most.

I always remember the saying 'money is the root of all evil' and perhaps it's the capitalist consumer society that has meant we are loosing the way a bit in the false assumption that we are somehow going to have a happier life with more money and more stuff. Well money is nice it makes life easier the bills get paid and all that but in all honesty it's easier to become self sufficient and drop out from this existence that we are in as 'wage slaves' than to ever reach 'the top'. 'The top' keeps getting higher but the bottom will always be at the same point and it's down there that life really is life and without people at the bottom propping the rest of society up we haven't got a society.

Oh dear I think I'm back to ranting again......