I think what he meant by meritocracy is that the merits from doing projects hands on and having solid results, as opposed to the “scholastic” meritocracy which I had initially assumed he meant (and which may be confusing other readers too).
Orthogonal to being physically outside and interacting with people, is the issue of social networks and their effect on mental health. I’d argue that reddit and other anonymous social networks (ahem hn) which allow users to register under any nick and without a forced email or phone verification, are much healthier for people’s mental health. There is a large gulf between semi anonymous and “real-name-enforced” social media.
I mean, a lot of relatively smart people I know these days have gotten over fb and I don’t see many of people in fb or social media that much. Fb gets old after college and then it takes people a few years in their mid twenties to grow out of it. By late twenties I’d say the majority of smart folks know to keep their distance from fb and such ilk.