(this is not Alex! this is Cecily. I hope you are having a lovely day)

Yesterday morning I found, among the junk and nonsense fallen from the letterbox, a letter from a friend who lives abroad. A real, actual letter. She always uses the cutest stationery. I put it on the desk, went about my day, failed to open it until I came back home hours later. I was delighted to receive it, and I felt guilty. She's always the one that writes me a letter; I can manage about an email in response, sometimes, if I remember to get round to it. Otherwise it all waits until we're briefly in the same place, when we've an afternoon free to spend wandering around, talking about everything. I think about her a lot – I've been thinking of her loads this week in particular, partly because of job stuff she'd be interested in, partly because I'm soon off on holiday to a town she knows well – but how's she going to know that? I'm not putting the same work into maintaining my friendships that she does. I don't even do Christmas cards, other than scrawling my name on the ones my mother sends out to old friends and relations.

It's interesting how quickly the Metafilter thread on Emotional Labour gets onto the issue of whose job it is to send cards, remember birthdays, maintain familial relationships (spoiler alert: it's pretty gendered!!). That's not really the focus of the Jess Zimmerman piece that's the thread's starting point; it's just where the flow of conversation goes. This is the sort of thing I love MetaFilter for: not just the useful and interesting ideas, not just the many delightful examples of patience and kindness and helpfulness between internet strangers, but the way the discussion in a thread evolves as people riff on or react to each others' posts. Sometimes it's like a school of fish, a flock of birds. Everyone arguing in one direction until someone darts out with a sudden original idea that skews the story and the whole group wheel about, staying in motion, a new heading in everyone's mind. 

The other thing I love MetaFilter for is, of course, the "human relations" tag on Ask Metafilter. It's so good. I mean, it's useful. There are some suggestions in there that I have found genuinely helpful for navigating life as a human being among human beings. Reading Ask MeFi's "human relations" tag you start to realise that there are so many existential and interpersonal problems that really only require one of five solutions. DTMFA ("dump the mf already"); go into therapy; engage a lawyer; set and assert boundaries; take up couch to 5k. Maybe, while you're at it, you can read one of the canonical self-help texts: the Gift of Fear, Allen Carr's Easy Way To Stop Smoking, Codependent No More, the Emotional Labour thread.

But also I love the Human Relations tag for reasons of what we might call #selfcare. I love it because it reminds me that I am not the worst person in the world. No matter how small and selfish my heart, how low and petty I am being, how wrong-headed and histrionic: the internet is here to remind me that some other person - some perfectly functional and passingly ordinary person - is definitely worse. Not people who are actively evil (though you hear plenty about them, on Ask MeFi as on the rest of the internet). Just people who are… wrong. Maybe it's an advice seeker! Maybe it's the person they're seeking advice about. Maybe it's one of the people giving them advice. They are making some awful decisions, suggesting some really ill-advised solutions, asserting some incredibly incorrect opinions. And yet they still manage to live in the world. There really is hope for all of us. 

The Awl's Alex Balk, one of my favourite internet humans, asserts several laws for thinking about the internet, the first two of which are: “Everything you hate about The Internet is actually everything you hate about people” and "The worst thing is knowing what everyone thinks about anything." And, sure, a lot of my internet time is spent choking on the pea soup of other people's boring opinions: the clickbait and the hot takes, the grandstanding, the bragging, the false naivety, people responding to the backlash before the pre-lash has even been written. I'm a firm believer in Never Reading The Comments -- except when it's the comments on, for example, Heather Havrilesky's excellent Ask Polly advice columns. People sincerely want to give strangers advice on all kinds of problems: because they sympathise with and want to help others, and because they are bossy, or monomaniacal, or attempting to atone for some personal past sin. All these things at once! Aren't people amazing. 

I worry a lot about etiquette, how I come across, what is the right thing to do. Advice columns are useful for working out these sort of questions: less in the definite answers that they give, more in the constant struggle between the answer and the pushback it receives. But also advice columns are the supportive and sassy best friend of a million rom-coms. You have to forgive yourself first, they say; that's a deal-breaker, get out now; I am sorry that things are hard for you; don't change to suit anybody else, but you probably should still change. 

The thing that keeps me coming back to advice columns, though, is their greatest and most reassuring reminder: other people on the internet are so awful that, statistically, you cannot be as awful as you feared. 

xx

c