Eleanor Rigby's Second Life avatar

It's a point-counterpoint that goes on both in my head as well as with other people: are the lonely people of the world better off with the alternate reality that the online world gives them more and more each day, or were they better off with lives that they had to work to improve; a reality where they had to seek social satisfaction and didn't have the easy out of the internet?

I tend to side with the former. Before the internet age, the lonely had to figure out a way to make friends. Some of the more socially able people were able to find like-minded people to share their hobbies and interests with, but where did that leave the socially awkward and the painfully shy? Going online and creating alterate personalities or spending hours playing games with others may seem somewhat sad, but for a lot of people, it's a way to cobble together an interactive life where they would otherwise have little to nothing. It's easy for the rest of us to look down on it as pathetic, to give these people that are no more than theoretical to us the near-meaningless kiss-off to "get a life", but what's the alternative? Do we really think that people spending hours in Second Life or World of Warcraft would otherwise have had rich, meaningful lives? That it's only the internet that keeps them from even trying?

Look at it this way: we'll all have extremely enriching golden years. Whether our spouses are gone and left us lonely or we've just found ourselves 75 years old and living in a home with only 2 or 3 hours of tired social interaction a day, we'll still be able to find communities of similar-thinking 75-year-olds somewhere online. We won't be left to the daily visits from the pigeons. We'll have it all virtual. Lucky us.