Playing a lot of VRchat drains you and makes people depressed because it is fundamentally a game without goals, and goals that people tend to make for themselves in this game, such as making friends, do not end up feeling very rewarding.
It is either far too easy (acting friendly is enough to be considered positively by most people), or extraordinary difficult (surmounting and surpassing the relations that a clique of close friends already have through months or years of interaction is a significantly grueling endeavor). Another important attribute for a successful multiplayer game is the player’s ability to feel that they are more proficient than their peers. In VRchat this is difficult to measure, except either on relations to a person on a person by person basis, or by having their own character and importance amplified by the general public. This can be problematic in two ways, as first it encourages attention whoring to inflate one’s own image, and secondly it encourages bullying to also inflates one’s own image by comparison. Worst yet, those that are dramatically socially unfit and who have a self-awareness and insecurity about their unfitness, such as Jelly and Cleetus, often resort to irrational acts of disruption, hatred, and other misguided attempts to garner peoples’ scorn, as having negative attention is better than having none of it.
Forgive me for my seemingly nearly sociopathic outlook on affection and relations, but I strongly believe that the only difference between my outlook and a typical /vrg/er is that I am self-aware that we all play games to accomplish goals and work to meet them, while most others do the same thing autonomously by merely following their base desires.
Anyone who feels as if they put a lot of effort into their character usually feels that a lot of attention or affection is owed to them. These people are easy to spot, they are easy to manipulate, and they are easy to crush and dishearten whenever you might desire.