I agree with you that meaningful online relationships can happen and do happen, but as I grow older I find myself agreeing with the parent poster. You need face

I agree with you that meaningful online relationships can happen and do happen, but as I grow older I find myself agreeing with the parent poster. You need face to face friends, and if you think you don't, it's worth digging into why. You set up a false comparison, by the way. There are both meaningful and not meaningful offline relationships, as there are both meaningful and not meaningful online ones. Most offine relationships are not meaningful. It's not useful to compare offline acquaintances with close online friends, just as it's not useful to compare offline friends to online pseudoanonymous interactions. I grew up on web forums and had/have friends who are just online friends, so I'm no stranger to the phenomenon. But you can't get a hug online. I'm not implying that a hug is essential, but it represents a class of interactions mostly around intimacy (both platonic and non-platonic) that the digital medium has a lot of trouble substituting. I'm not a touchy feely person, and I'm more fine with traveling alone than pretty much all of my friends, but I still carefully maintain local meatspace friends because I find those interactions essential to my long term happiness regardless of having online friends. In other words, I disagree with you because I think the medium really does matter, orthogonally to the question of the quality of the relationship.