I would argue that the ancient man living in the woods is absolutely right about cities—a person in a concrete jungle is dangerously isolated from reality. We know the negative effects of too little sunlight, we know the positive effects of exposure to nature. We know the negative environmental effects of the infrastructure that makes the concrete jungle possible, but those effects are invisible to the resident of the jungle.
Also, it's pretty clear that cities are too large for our social apparatus. The ancient man living in a tribe has a deeper personal connection with his fellow villagers than anything we develop in a city, much less in the worldwide city we call the internet.
Given all that, I think it's reasonable to take a backwards-looking approach to this. Evolution happens on the time scale of millennia, and our biology has had only had a few hundred years to adjust to the modern city. Rushing headlong along the same path into full, always-connected VR is hazardous.
Taking the Roman Empire as an example: Rome was by far the largest city in the empire at a total of ~1 million people. The others were estimated to have 500 thousand or fewer, with only 25-30% of the population living in a city at all.
Modern cities are enormous by comparison and our urbanization rate is completely flipped. 80% of people in the US live in a city, and we have 50 metro areas with a higher population than Rome had during the empire. Our largest metro area is New York/Newark/Jersey City at 20 million people, 20x that of imperial Rome.
And remember that Rome itself was an anomaly in its day, and the Roman Empire in general was an anomaly in European history.
At an extraordinary cost to human health. Sewage problems spread disease. Malnourishment due to only eating bread. The average height of a Paleolithic man far exceeded the height of a Neolithic man.
This is Berkson's paradox - Neolithic men may have been less healthy, but that could be because the hunter-gatherers died or stopped having children when they ran out of food rather than living off bread.
Also, it's pretty clear that cities are too large for our social apparatus. The ancient man living in a tribe has a deeper personal connection with his fellow villagers than anything we develop in a city, much less in the worldwide city we call the internet.
Given all that, I think it's reasonable to take a backwards-looking approach to this. Evolution happens on the time scale of millennia, and our biology has had only had a few hundred years to adjust to the modern city. Rushing headlong along the same path into full, always-connected VR is hazardous.