Great essay. I also got on IRC in the late 90s and ran into someone who was feeling down. They didn't say they were about to kill themselves, luckily, just that

Great essay. I also got on IRC in the late 90s and ran into someone who was feeling down. They didn't say they were about to kill themselves, luckily, just that they were quite depressed. Somehow before the everyone got online I had a number of quite deep conversations with people. The internet now is a double edged sword. You can learn a lot from it, you can give or get help, you can do things that you couldn't just a few years ago. But you can also get helplessly addicted to things you find there, spending years looking for a dopamine hit that you perhaps thought was on the other side of the sword.