@communitycoin in answer to your question about the value of hermits for humanity, maybe Leonard Cohen's definition of a saint might help shed some light:
“What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is a caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape.”
― Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers
PS - Cohen himself spent 7 years in a monastery, and so understood well the value of withdrawing from society and leading a contemplative life...
An Appreciation of Cohen https://steemit.com/ocd-resteem/@yahialababidi/you-live-your-life-as-if-it-s-real-leonard-cohen-an-appreciation
We're not sure what the answers are, but if there are answers, Leonard Cohen surely had some of them.
Haha, good answer :) I'm a huge fan of The Man!