All my batteries are failing ever faster falling farther

The stuff I used to know is ailing -

Whither my recharger?

The other day CBC aired a program about people who are wrecking their lives and the lives of those around them by playing an online video game called Second Life (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_life). In it they live a second life, presumably the one they wished they were living - one free from taxes, inclement weather, and body fat. The avatars are all 20-somethings with apparently ideal appearances for 20-something avatars. This means that they look like a very small percentage of humaniods depicted in magazines which utilize the realistic cartoon genre instead of disappointing their readership with merely airbrushed photographs. At least, it seems unlikely that the game offers the option of creating an ugly avatar, but I can't be sure. The reason the game destroys lives, usually marriages, is that its players end up falling in love with some curious complex of the avatar in the game and a 'real' person animating the avatar at some terminal, somewhere. The broadcast reported that one woman, a mother of three, spent up to 14 hours a day playing the online game. If her avatar was sexually engaged on the screen she would politely lock the door to her (and her husband's) bedroom to avoid any awkward moments, that is, just in case things weren't feeling awkward already.

Needless to say that the husband is devastated by his spouse's creative pastime and Second Life love. He wonders why his wife has rejected him in order to make her avatar have sex (what the game essentially amounts to) with the avatar of another man (she assumes) whom she has never met and presumably has no plans to meet.  The camera views the bedroom, in which the wife and computer embrace poetically adjacent a bed that seems plain and cold, unadorned in any way. Next scene opens to the kitchen as the man stumbles in the door with bags of groceries in hand and three kids close behind. He is now a single parent. With so little reality impinging on his marriage how might the man take action. There is no other man nearby to confront, only a computer screen reflecting the eerie image of second life overlaid by his wifes glazed over grin at the possibilities.

We must ask occasionally what technology has done to the world when situations like these emerge. I think that technology is escape, mostly. But this only begs the question: escape from what? The theoretical answer is that it is escape from nature. We prefer to stay warm rather than freeze in the cold rain, so we build a shelter and later, central heat. We can thereby justify the apparent good technology enables in very many ways (e.g. medical technology). However, in the end society rarely ponders the question of whether we should make something that we are able to make, even when it seems to enable a 'good' or disable a 'bad'. It is almost as if our potential as sub-creators under God is its own curse, as well as a blessing. Our cosmos is such that by the time the idea is born it seems impossible to restrain it. It is a metaphysical dilemma, and a clue which points towards that tired old idea of original sin, good and bad and so forth. But it seems that in our technological age we've moved on from such outdated ideas. We no longer move slow enough to ponder them.