"Normies now feel what we feel all the time. Alone, bored, sad, aimless, horny, empty, desolate..."

"... disconnected from the rest of humanity — the endless drone of whining and moaning I’m seeing on the social media timelines is the hellscape we have to endure constantly all the time during ‘normal times’, I can’t help but have a huge dose of schadenfreude over this — welcome to our world normiescum."

Wrote somebody on an incel website, quoted in a NYT article titled "Who Goes Alt-Right in a Lockdown?/Mass anxiety, political instability, and isolation are a pretty good combination for warping peoples’ world views," by Annie Kelly, who is identified as "a Ph.D. student [at t the University of East Anglia in England] researching the impact of digital cultures on anti-feminism and the far right."

Kelly goes on to opine:

It is undeniable that crises like a pandemic demand radical solutions.... But my research finds that the subcultural aspects of the internet... can make us feel less lonely in the short term but often end up entrenching us further into certain fatalistic and misanthropic ways of thinking....  In fact, the internet — for good and for ill — is a collaborative and imaginative space, rather than somewhere one group of people talks and another listens.... In this age of isolation, we need to be aware of how far-right actors will attempt to exploit this unprecedented situation....