SL was originally meant to be an alternate world, kind of like what Meta was attempting to do with their metaverse, only SL actually accomplished it first.

There are people with fulltime employment in SL, actual real jobs making real money. I know programmers there that fulltime work on scripting, and builders that make the most absurdly overcomplicated things..almost stunning in their complexity.

There were attempts to link SL worlds to the real world, such as the telescope in Chile that has actual space pictures you can view from the virtual world, and people even tried to use SL for educational purposes, building schools and meeting spaces within.

All of that collapsed under the sheer weight of the BDSM and furry communities, though, but some shadows of it still remain.

I think that SL represents a fundamental shift in the human condition that hasn't yet gone mainstream. The idea that you can be whoever you want to be and take whatever form you want to take.

At present in 1st life we can only change our hair colour with dye, and our clothes. We can adopt different styles but our form is much harder to change except through exercise.

As technology advances though, we will soon find that the aspects of our identity that truly matter are the ones we choose, not those that we are limited to by our weak technology. SL is ahead of the curve on that, perhaps by centuries.

What matters in a person isn't the physical thing you see before you. That can change, it's nothing more than the wallpaper. It's the chaotic twist of concept space that makes up the mind which is actually real. That part endures through time, and if they write down enough and are remembered, it even survives their death.