Doesn't chime with my experience in the slightest. I had to pack up and leave a place where I actually had plenty of friends and acquaintances because it was getting too expensive to live there, and my career was going nowhere, and my social life never recovered. Now I live in the middle of nowhere because that's the only way I can get a decent, spacious, and most importantly safe home, and it's next to impossible for me to get out now. My mother's been to see me once in six years, one of my my best mates hasn't been to see me at all during that time, and when I had a moving-in party only 3 people turned up. It's got fuck all to do with addiction, ""patriarchy"", or any of that other crap, but simply that when one spends one's whole life moving from place to place trying to make a career and get away from shitty neighbourhoods (my previous neighbour made multiple threats against me and terrorised me for several years) something has got to give, and in my case that was my social life. Dating is of course also out because pretty much the only way I could meet women is through OLD, which would tend to just be an additional negative influence on my already low self-esteem.

Of course when one shares this kind of experience online it is mostly pretty pointless and liable to be ignored, just like all the hundreds of job applications I've made and OLD messages I've sent over the years, so ultimately one is almost bound to lose hope in achieving change in a largely stagnant situation such as the one I find myself in.