The internet isn’t an escape from loneliness and depression. Its the cause. What makes Western societies unique is that they have always taken the individual, the single person, as the basic unit of society. This individual is like an atom. It exists by itself and can make autonomous decisions. Whereas, in China, India etc. the self is always networked. A person is in part made up of the relations they have with others and they cannot exist as a full person without them e.g. the 5 relations of Confucius. Another feature of Western individualism is the distinction between an authentic self and an inauthentic public persona which is simply the image you present to others to seem professional, normal etc.

Computer tech is individualistic, everyone has a personal computer and the stuff on their hard drives and what they do online is private. Its not a shared activity, like sitting around the family hearth. The idea of the internet was that it would liberate people’s authentic self from their public persona, allowing them to be free. You don’t have to conform and can express your own individuality. You can see this clearly with imageboards and textboards e.g. the hostility to normalfags, transgenders who can separate their inner self from their body and act out in their ideal gender.

The side effect of this individualism is that it creates loneliness and stress. Its extremely unnatural to most human cultures. The internet atomizes people, creating loneliness. We then try to cure this loneliness by reaching out for social connection via the internet because its what we know best. The irony is that what we have is a big crowd where people are deprived of the tools to make meaningful connections. So we just wind up digging ourselves deeper and deeper. And since Western individualism has conquered every developed country, there’s no alternative.

We don’t use the internet because society is unhappy. The internet makes us unhappy and we can’t stop taking a sip of the crack pipe because we’ve moved so much of our social activities online that there isn’t much of a real world to socialize in anymore.