I'm a furry because I think anthropomorphic animals are neat. It's kind of just that simple. Participation as a furry to me is just a minimum of making an avatar (a fursona) and talking to or hanging out with other furries. Honestly, it's hardly different than modern VTuber obsession -- our community just happened to start with early western animation rather than more recent eastern animation.

Furry is a "lifestyle" and can be taken as far as you want it to take it. We are a community you can chill in, a hobby you can participate in as any kind of creative person from artist, to musician, to 3D modeling, to the person developing the extremely complicated sex stuff going on in VRChat, or a kink you can dress up and fuck in. You can either make everything yourself, buy your way in, or it's honestly totally normal to just hang around artists enough that they end up making things for you when they're bored -- although it's good manners to actually participate in that person's area of the community rather than begging for art.

Furry being more of a lifestyle than a hobby means it's very easy to just include it in your daily rituals. There are hundreds, if not over a thousand furries in the greater Seattle area. I can go to dinner with other furries, I participate in a furry Twitch community, I game online with furries, and I'm currently about to go on a camping trip out in the woods of Washington for an event called Furwood that takes place at an exclusively queer campsite called Triangle Recreation Camp with nearly a hundred people (though many are dropping out due to the expected rainy weather this weekend).

What furries are NOT is:

1. A collective of pedophiles/groomers/zoophiles. They do exist in the community (and basically every online community) but almost every site/app explicitly blacklists this content and good Lord you should see the anti-zoophile witchhunts on Twitter. The natural anonymity of furries and sheer scale of the fandom does result in these things coming up frequently though, and furries could definitely do a better job moderating their spaces.
2. Exclusively people dressing up in fursuits to bang. This is a minority of furries that shit costs thousands of dollars. There is, however, a lot of overlap with puppy play, a bdsm kink involving pups and handlers roleplaying as various animals, usually dogs. I know many people who own a partial fursuit (they wear a head and hands but the rest is normal clothes) and also a leather/neoprene pup mask that they switch to for the actual sex stuff.
3. People who believe they are actually animals. These are called "Therians" and many Therians are also furries but most furries are not Therians. It is pretty normal to ROLEPLAY your sona, but the depth of that roleplay is up to the individual. For example, I refer to myself as a polar bear on the internet but that's about it. I do however know people in our community who have 10+ pages of lore, use the dreaded creepy asterisks, commissioned custom multi-hundred dollar VRC avatars, and never break character.