How do you not meet people? Even if you're stuck in front of a computer all day you can go out to a pub or something at the weekend.
Put yourself in a social environment and be friendly. It sounds like you even have experience of that from school and uni.
I can happily deep focus almost indefinitely, including putting off eating but only if I'm really interested in doing something. I can also doggedly persevere with something I feel like I ought to do but become progressively more depressed doing it. I'm starting to think I may have something like ADHD but need to look into it a bit more.
My advice to you is to listen to yourself. If you're reaching a limit of how much time you want to spend on something take a break from it. You'll get more done that way and your learning will probably be more effective. Or it may even be worth reassessing whether you really want to do it at all. It's fine (and very important IMHO) to refine & update your goals to ones that suit you better. You might be tempted to beat yourself up about being a 'quitter' but it will be better.
VPNs hide your IP from your ISP and anyone they share that information with. Here in the UK ISPs keep a record of every internet connection you make and pass it on to the government and perhaps others. Using a VPN here means that instead of them knowing every single website you visit they just know you are using a VPN (or Tor, or a proxy etc if that's what you're using). All they can tell from that data is what time you're active online and how much data you upload/download, not which websites you're visiting.
The websites that you connect to at the other end can still determine who you are by means other than your IP address, like information that your machine presents to them which is unique. VPNs don't protect against this.
A VPN is like a private courier. What the recipient does with the delivered message (and what you've put in it) is out of the courier's hands.
Not sure whether it helps but after the last major update on YUNOhost it notified me of a few extra DNS entries I had to make. If I remember correctly it was under Domains, rather than Diagnosis.
Remember that you can always have current versions of programs by using flatpak and appimage on Debian.
I'm currently on Fedora because my hardware was not supported yet by Debian when I got it. I've had a lot more problems with Fedora than Debian though and intend to go back to Debian when 13 comes out and use flatpak for the applications that I really want to be at their current version.
I have similar values to yours re community and privacy.
I guess we disagree a bit then. Don't get me wrong - I'm not condemning Lemmy. I think it's extremely valuable in democratising social media. And it functions brilliantly for communication and sharing knowledge.
I'm just saying that a side-effect of its functionality is that it's also addictive. For example I believe that there users who log in, help each other troubleshoot problems growing their tomatoes and then log out, but at the same time there are users who are passively consuming content from the feed way past their bedtime. There are even memes here about it.
How do you not meet people? Even if you're stuck in front of a computer all day you can go out to a pub or something at the weekend. Put yourself in a social environment and be friendly. It sounds like you even have experience of that from school and uni.