It starts innocently. Your phone buzzes once, and someone has added you to a group chat with a cheerful name like "Weekend Plans!!!" and eleven people you sort of know. You did not apply for this job. There was no interview, no consent form, and definitely no exit interview scheduled. Congratulations, you live here now.
Within an hour there are 212 unread messages. Nobody has that much to say about one weekend. There are three competing suggestions, four memes, a blurry photo of a menu, someone asking a question that was answered six messages earlier, and one person replying "lol" to everything like it is a medical condition. You scroll up to find the actual plan and give up somewhere around the second argument about parking.
The real trap is that leaving feels like a crime. In a normal conversation you can wander off. In a group chat, leaving sends an announcement. You might as well stand on a chair, bang a spoon on a glass, and declare that you no longer care for these people. So you stay, muted, watching the little notification number climb like a taxi meter.
Muting helps, until it does not. Mute for an hour and you miss the one useful detail buried between the jokes. Mute forever and someone will ask, in person, why you never responded about the thing everyone agreed on without you. There is no correct setting. There is only checking at red lights of the soul, wondering when your phone became a part-time job.
Then comes the side chat. Someone starts a smaller group to talk about the big group. Then someone else starts a group about that group. Soon you are in three chats about the same dinner, and the dinner itself is the least discussed topic in any of them. One chat is for logistics, one is for feelings about the logistics, and one appears to exist solely for a single cousin to send sunrise photos.
The midnight messages deserve their own complaint department. Most people sleep. Group chats do not. At 1:40 in the morning someone remembers a hilarious video, someone else answers with a string of laughing faces, and your phone lights up the ceiling like a tiny, rude lighthouse. You wake up convinced there is an emergency, and the emergency is a meme you have already seen twice.
And yet, here is the annoying truth: every so often the chat actually works. A plan comes together. Someone shares genuinely good news. A joke lands at exactly the moment you needed one. That is how it gets you. One good minute buys it another month of buzzing.
So you stay. You mute, you skim, you reply with a thumbs-up to things you have not fully read, and you promise yourself you will leave after this one event. You will not. There will be another event, another name change, and another 212 messages. Welcome home.