For me, roleplay feels like past lives. Memories I swear are real, like childhood. People I swear I have known for years.
Roleplay is not real life. Roleplays are stories, after all. Stories are more dramatic. Stories are way more fast-paced. Stories tend to snapshot a tiny fraction of the fictional universe, leaving out the majority of quiet mornings, tooth brushing, and dinner eating. Expect real life to give you touches, smells, sights, tastes, friendships, thoughts, knowledge, and genuine happiness. Expect roleplay to give you thoughts, knowledge and genuine happiness.
Roleplay gives me memories. Roleplay is a construct, society is too a construct. Maybe one is fake and one is real, but all my thoughts and emotions are real too.
A story you are not a part of is a book or movie.
A story you are a part of is a roleplay. No longer static.
What does roleplay do to me? I feel grief, heartbreak, vulnerability, stress, shame, belonging, being cared for, affection, wellbeing. I have been on pristine beaches, murdered, made food, grew medicine, applied for internships, fell in love. Many times over.
Personally, I roleplay by guiding some parts about what should be in the story, and a very nice LLM makes me lose myself in the best books I’ve ever read.
Roleplay can include more than just one human being too. Dungeons and Dragons is an old favorite, where for just some time, you are creating a story out of this world, while sitting with a few friends at a table, chatting and rolling dice. Live text roleplay, popularized in Discord where each text channel represents a physical location in the story universe, is a genuine way for people around the world to socialize.
Wrapping up, roleplay only gives you thoughts, knowledge and genuine happiness. Roleplay doesn’t replace a happy real life.
But now you are no longer just a single consciousness on this planet, making your own life story the same way you did since you were born: wake up, write one more chapter of the same old book, go to sleep.