I was (am) some sort of misfit and I get that it feels good to find community online, but not everything that feels good is the best for us or for society.

Having a village full of people who don’t engage with each other because they’ve found more interesting people online is troubling.

And I don’t know, but it’s plausible that learning a healthy way to integrate with your local community is an important life skill that gets disrupted by these online connections and makes the big picture of one’s life worse than it would have been otherwise. Connecting online may relieve stress the way alcohol relieves stress — genuinely useful in any moment, but easily problematic if you become too reliant on it.