The case against social media has gotten so well rehearsed that most people can easily merge it into ordinary conversation: It makes people lonely. It sorts them into camps. It hands them a room full of people who already agree with them and calls that a community.

I’ve given this speech myself, with feeling, having read my phone notifications in the host’s powder room 11 minutes earlier.

I am a pediatrician, health communicator and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, and diagnosing is in my blood. Two decades of research, a surgeon general’s advisory on loneliness and Meta’s recent settlement of up to US$17 billion, pending court approval, all describe the same thing. What we recite are the symptoms. The more interesting question is what these symptoms diagnose.

Simply put, our dependency on social media creates a deficiency disease. It’s not something toxic we’re ingesting; it is something our lives online have stopped us from receiving.

I figured out that cost while standing in a field in Harford Park with a dog leash wrapped around my ankles.

A corner bar without the alcohol

Harford Park in Wayne, Pennsylvania, is 30 acres of rolling grass and mature trees the township designated for off-leash dogs in 1997.

I go most afternoons. So do the same 15 or 20 people, which is how I ended up tangled in someone else’s very long leash on a Tuesday, concentrating hard enough on my own feet that I stopped talking and just listened.

Two conversations were running at once. In one, a regular who is having a rough year was getting gently harassed about the weight he’d put on against his doctors’ advice — first........

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