Logging Off

You don’t post for the next week, feeling a residual awkwardness mixed with guilt. Daniella isn’t posting and texts you infrequently.

In the vast expanses of time you suddenly acquire, you move from room to room of your apartment, feeling listless. You realize that you haven’t called your parents recently. You realize you haven’t seen Alice in weeks.

When you finally reach out, she doesn’t respond for two days. It is almost certainly a passive-aggressive move, but maybe you deserve it. You haven’t made time for her, and perhaps she has downgraded you from best-friend to ordinary-friend territory.

When she finally texts back, she is very brief: Let’s get drinks this weekend. Please don’t bail on me again.

When you arrive at the bar she acts noticeably cooler towards you. “It’s been incredibly hard to stay in touch with you,” she says. And it’s true, obviously. But once your drinks arrive, she relaxes a little. She runs you through everything you’ve missed: a new crush, a frustrating performance review at work, a family drama. An hour in, you tell her about the forum.

“Now I understand why you were never around,” Alice says. “It sounds like you were really involved.”

“I don’t know if I want to be anymore,” you say slowly. “I’m surprised by how cruel people can be sometimes. Either that, or they try to avoid any unpleasant, negative interactions.” Which is, perhaps, what you did: not posting anything, not reaching out to Daniella, believing that the situation could be ignored.

“Why do you think people care about the forum so much?” Alice asks.

“It’s mostly nice. There’s so much information — it’s incredible how knowledgeable people are there,” you say. “And maybe the people there are just bored, or lonely, or stuck in their lives.”

“Is that you?” she asks. “Stuck in your life?” Alice has a certain skill you’ve always envied: being direct without being unkind. You sip your cocktail slowly and consider this.

“I can’t tell,” you say. “But I feel close to the people there, and I’ve learned a lot about the world around me, so it doesn’t feel like a waste of time to stand still.”

When you return home you have a private message from one of the moderators. The childlike, nervous What have I done wrong? feeling immediately kicks in. You open it.

From: soil_to_soil Moderator

To: chaparral

Hey, hope you’re doing well. We’re thinking of adding some new moderators to the team across different time zones. The forum’s grown a lot and it’s frankly hard for us to keep up. You’ve always been really level-headed and a pleasure to talk to — would you be interested?

Maybe this is what it’s like to be cool on the internet. You feel elated and then nervous. At first, being away from the forum made you feel restless. Now it feels calming. There is very little pointless, manufactured conflict in the real world. Only the real conflicts, the real crises: politics, climate change, caring too little about the world, caring too much about everything and letting the uncertainty pull you under, preventing you from doing anything useful.

But you do like the forum. You miss the distraction. You miss the excitement of planning foraging trips and filing away facts about the flora and fauna of your area in your head.

But you are terribly aware, now, that there will always be these conflicts in front of you. As a moderator, you wouldn’t be able to run away. You’d have to say something, do something. Do you want to be responsible for that?

• Accept the moderator position ›
• Decline the moderator position ›