Octet the Musical is such an interesting show to me, because listening through it once makes you feel like it's kind of just beating you over the head with "get off your damn phones." What the support group talks about is just the ugliest parts of the internet; harassment, exploitation, doomscrolling, loneliness and misogyny, conspiricism, and whatever the hell Marvin has going on. And you basically end up feeling like, yeah, it sucks. But then, Velma hits you with "Beautiful", which is just basically saying "blaming the internet for all of your problems won't actually fix anything!". Because so much of the support groups music is dedicated to the dichotomy of The Monster and The Forest. The Forest (the real world) is beautiful, pure and perfect, while the Monster (the internet) is explicitly modern, disgusting and corrosive. The show is built around these splits but we can see that it's not just the Internet- Jessica's belief that the Internet has made people cruel, Henry's struggle with over-stimulation and passive suicidal ideation, Paula's growing distance from her husband, Karly and Ed's desire for some kind of love, Toby's nihilism and turn to conspiracies and Marvin's loss of wonder - all of these problems stem from these people and their lives, and are exacerbated on the Internet. It's telling that the ideal outcome for the support group is to drug everyone's tea so they can "return to their pure, pre-technological state". And it's also telling that Velma, the youngest, the only one of the group to have made a genuine connection on the internet and the one who seems to be most aware that the "real world" isn't a heavenly paradise - she sings about "the forest of dead trees". The life on the Internet is not a different life to the The conclusion Octet comes to isn't "those damn phones", it's "everything and nothing might be real"