Online realms make us safer, but sometimes also stunted

binge drinking, hard drug use — all are down.

But over the same period, adulthood has become less responsible, less obviously adult. For the first time in over a century, more 20-somethings live with their parents than in any other arrangement. The marriage rate is way down, and despite a high out-of-wedlock birthrate, American fertility just hit an all-time low. More and more prime-age workers are dropping out of the workforce — men especially, and younger men more so than older men, though female workforce participation has dipped, as well.

You can tell different stories that synthesize these trends: strictly economic ones about the impact of the Great Recession, critical ones about the infantilizing effects of helicopter parenting, upbeat ones about how young people are forging new life paths.

But I want to advance a technology-driven hypothesis: This mix of youthful safety and adult immaturity may be a feature of life in a society increasingly shaped by the internet’s virtual realities.

It is easy to see how online culture would make adolescent life less dangerous.

Pornography to take the edge off teenage sexual appetite. Video games instead of fisticuffs or contact sports as an outlet for hormonal aggression. Sexting and selfie-enabled masturbation as a safer alternative to hooking up. Online hangouts instead of keggers in the field. More texting and driving, but less driving — one of the most dangerous teen activities — overall.

The question is whether this substitution is habit-forming and soul-shaping, and whether it extends beyond dangerous teen behavior to include things essential to long-term human flourishing — marriage, work, family, all that old-fashioned “meatspace” stuff.

The keenest critics of how the internet shapes culture, writers like Sherry Turkle, often are hopeful that with time and experience, we will learn better management strategies, which keep the virtual in its place before too many real goods are lost.

My mother, Patricia Snow (yes, even columnists have mothers), in an essay for First Things earlier this year, suggested that any effective resistance to virtual reality’s encroachments would need to be moral and religious, not just pragmatic and managerial.

We have a pacifist community within our own society that’s organized around religious resistance to advanced technology — the Old Order Amish.

The future probably doesn’t belong to the Pennsylvania Dutch. But the Amish impulse is one to watch, as we reckon with virtual reality’s strange gift — a cup that tastes of progress, but might have poison waiting in the dregs.