Real Life is where our laughter is heard.
Real Life is what happens when your computer crashes -- s
That painful, annoying, boring, awful place that the sane spend most of their time trying to escape. Then there are those of it who get caught and are beaten into submission.
Describe Real Life here.
I'd rather not... That reminds me of this bit in The Moon Isa Harsh Mistress (Robert Heinlein) where Manny greets newly self-aware computer Mike with "Hey Mike, what do you know", and the machine responds with "In the beginning there was emptiness..."
Real Life is that big, high-res, high-color screen saver behind all the windows. But never mind, it doesn't have a thing to do with us programmers anyway. -- Falk Bruegmann
Real Life = Apparent Reality - Subjective Perception. Off the top of my head anyway, but don't hold me to that. -- Corry Harper
The stuff that happens out in the Big Blue Room. You know, the one that Marketing and Sales seem to spend all their time in. Management goes there quite a bit, too. -- Ed Grimm
Real -:
Not artificial
Life -:
An animating and shaping force
There's an argument to be made that nothing is real. And nothing to get hung about. Strawberry fields forever. But the technology of clay and water gives rise to the biology of algae and amoebae. Biological forces refine these beasts until they start to invent new technologies. Biology and technology ceaselessly give rise to one another. Real life then is a myth; the blue room and the blue screen are inextricably ensorceled.
And yet there's that feeling of having one's face pressed against the gears. Most of us recall a time when we didn't just sit and type, but played and ran and lay in the long grass like tigers. We miss that, hunched over these keyboards in our darkened cubicles. Wasn't that the real stuff? Isn't that why we do this? The weekend barbeque, the wine-smoked dinner with friends, the occasional pool-party where we schmooze with future employers and employees ... that's not the same thing, is it?
Perhaps when we're old and too faded to make the grade any more, when the ceaseless one-upmanship of marketing and tinkering finally passes us by, we hope, we'll lay in the long grass again. But like tigers? Perhaps real life is something only children can truly enjoy.
Then again, who says you have to grow up? If you can drop the facade of earnest endeavor and throw yourself down a beach, you're a kid then. Taxes and mortgages have no power over you. Development? What development? -- Peter Merel
Going shopping, changing diapers.... the things that you can't dodge.
Things that make you feel alive... skiing, rafting.
Dealing with the things that you can't dodge while doing the things that make you feel alive... buying the lift ticket from the worker behind the bulletproof glass plate, putting your rain poncho on over your life preserver and helmet when it starts to rain . -- Alistair Cockburn
Real Life is what you experience every time you recognize that you have a choice, no matter how small, and exercise it for what you value. It could be as simple as smiling at someone. -- Michael Feathers
Last weekend there was a huge flotilla of geese on the lake behind my house. They cruised around, trying to look important. Sometimes they would fly off somewhere and then come soaring back in in a flock and do that half-land-half-crash thing they do. A Great Blue Heron was walking around the neighbor's dock, spearing down and grabbing something from under the water every now and then. Squirrels came to the bird feeder and stole seeds. We even had snow on the deck for a while. -- Ron Jeffries
Certainly sounds like Real Life to me. Except for the geese. Where I live (Atlanta), the Canada geese "migrate" in the fall. Several times a day they take flight and fly in a big circle in the classic V formation and land where they started. Actually, on second thought, they are each living their own Real Life in spite of what I or anyone else thinks they ought to do! -- Kiel Hodges
Real Life is experiencing things versus rationalizing them. When you experience things, life is moving forward into the future. When you interrupt that sense of experiencing things as they come - you are pushing them into the past, no matter how unquantifiably short the present moment actually is. And as you say, it's all illusory anyhow. -- Anthony Lander
The present is as much illusion as the past. Think about it; the real moment is a Planck moment, so vanishingly fleet that you can't experience it. "Now" is the process of memory and anticipation, which can be grown or shrunk as you like, consuming years or decades on either side of what you're sensing. Ignoring this is zen, sure, but no more real than anything else.
For programmers, Real Life can refer to programming done at work, rather than to programming done for fun or education. As in, "I enjoy playing around with Forth Language and Ruby Language in my spare time, but in Real Life I do everything in Cee Plus Plus." Or "The formal relational model is powerful, but in Real Life most programmers treat a relational database as a fancy sort of flat-file system." Or "That process model looks good on paper, but would never work in Real Life."
Real Life is the intersection of whatever makes you "you" with the things that are not you, particularly those things agreed to exist by "you" and the other participants in the "game". It follows that any set of circumstances wherein you have no intersect isn't "real life" to you. It also follows that "real life" (being the intersection of two or more sets) can be arbitrarily small or large in scope. -- Garry Hamilton
real life:that endless blur of interaction, cause and effect experienced between our birth and our death, that in moments of melancholy or loneliness we see as a disjointed montage. This montage although self-realising and personally important, is of no real consequence in the overall scheme of things. -- Ben Minton
"You wake up dead to find yourself in a place, where hope is is just a word and not a phrase, to everyone and anyone but you."
"Take the time to wonder why, you only live while your alive, if nothing else just spare yourself, the wasted nights alone." -- Jose Juarez
Real Life is not a game! Whenever someone says "This is not a game!", that signals that it is a Real Life here-and-now situation. Whenever someone says, "It's only a game!", that signals that the situation should be regarded as outside of Real Life. -- John Reynolds The Student
I know that "life is what happens when you're busy making plans"... (John Lennon)
Sometimes you can see what something is by looking at what it's not: Real Life is not:
Things imagined
Things hypothisized (Real Life could be a subset, though)
Things theoretical (again, Real Life could be a subset)
Multiple universes, "nothing is real", etc, make for interesting novel plots, but as serious consideration? I say Show Me the evidence. The evidence points to Real Life. -- Bruce Pennington
A counterpoint to Virtual Reality: usemod.com 
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See Also Big Room, Geta Life, Real World, Life Isa Big Messy Graph
See original on c2.com