A society built on near-connection eventually forgets what real connection even felt like. The children growing up inside it have nothing to compare it to. They will tell you honestly that they feel lonely, because they do, but they will not know that what they are missing is something their grandparents had without having to think about it. The loss becomes invisible to the very people losing it. That is the most dangerous kind of loss there is, because you cannot look for something when you no longer remember it exists.
And if relationship really is the thread that holds everything together, then what we are losing is not only our happiness or our mental health. We are drifting out of step with the way life itself actually works. That is the part almost no one wants to hear, because hearing it means admitting that life has a shape we did not invent, and that living against that shape costs us something real.