A bit more on addictions...

 Additional thoughts on addiction

I was just thinking, there's one side of addictions I haven't brought up. And it's not that I wasn't aware of them, it's more that I was first talking about my own addictions, past, present, future, and hypothetical. However, there are other types of addictions that strangely resemble RL addictions. 

For example, let's assume for a moment that my addiction is escorts.   Well, escorts in SL is substantially different than RL, since there's no physical possibilities. But let's just role play it... so  I have that.  What do some of the escorts have for addictions? Well, it could be many things.. clothing, paying past debts, sharing with other friends, saving for a rainy day, gambling, any most likely many others that aren't coming to mind at the moment.  Well, paying debts and sharing with friends isn't necessarily a bad thing, unless the debts are the result of an addiction that hasn't been dealt with yet.

But let's talk gambling.  SL has gambling in very similar shape as in RL.  Lottery, contests, bingo, they all involve taking a chance with your currency, and hope you grow it and get a profit.  Truth is, although there is a small chance you could win big, the typical end result is that you don't win anything, and if you do win something, you typically will reinvest it in your addiction, and end up with nothing in the end.

Those addictions usually will contain a statement such as "I'm only going to gamble this, then I'll quit if I don't win"... which of course, doesn't happen.. when the "this" is gone, there's usually "this once more" attached to it... and the end result is you get nothing.

Now, I won't pretend I'm not a victim of my own addictions. But I try to at least face them with the honest reality that this is money "wasted" that I will never get back, and I'm spending it on things that I could get for free, and while I do that, it is also feeding someone else's addiction. Should I feel at least partly responsible for someone else's addiction if it is being enabled by my giving them money? I don't think so. It is up to each individual to deal with their own things.  We can be there for each other, but we can't save the virtual world.

I like to think my thinking cap still works most of the time.  So I can often take an emotional topic and turn it into something more logical.  Gambling is an emotional thing (not talking about physical addictions like drugs, meds, or alcohol, although they could also be used to deal with emotions).  But by breaking it down and looking at the facts, it is easy to determine that gambling mostly serves the purpose of that gambling machine.  Sure, as I said earlier, there's a chance someone will win big... enough to cover whatever they have spent, and then some... but that's typically not the case.. so you'll maybe get lucky and spend 5000 and get back 20000... but how often does that actually happen? How often do you need to gamble to get that type of winnings, and then, add up all the times you didn't win.. See, it's easy to model that in your head.. then the voice will say "Oh, I know all that.. I'm not addicted, I just play for fun".. yet, all the savings go there.

The problem with gambling, especially in SL or other virtual types of gambling (and probably a lot of RL as well) is that the system is rigged. It is not true randomness.. or chance.. it is random in the sense that we probably don't know who will win, or how much, or when... but we do know that it is setup so that the "house" doesn't give more than it makes.. and there are various ways to do that.  

You can make it so that although setup "honestly", the odds of winning are so low that the house always turns out a big profit.  Or it can be "calculated"... add up all the earnings, and once in a while, give out "randomly" a percentage of those earnings.

So the choice is yours, to gamble or not to gamble.

Next episode, we'll get an update on the bot.