Arguing with the unreasonable is medicine for the dead.

I once spent almost four hours of a Saturday night in a comment thread with a stranger I will call Bill. It had started over a small, verifiable factual claim in an article we had both read. I was, I decided, going to be a good citizen of the internet — patient, sourced, polite. I linked to the primary study. He restated his original sentence.

I linked to a second study. He restated it, in capitals. I acknowledged the parts of his concern that were legitimate. He accused me of condescension. I apologized for tone. He accused me of retreating. Somewhere around hour three I realized, with a dropping feeling in my stomach, that he had not once actually engaged with anything I had written — he had only repeated his opening line in progressively louder forms, occasionally garnished with an insult about my profession.

At hour four I closed the tab. My shoulders were tight. My chest was hot. My Saturday was gone. I never got those four hours back. But in the ten years since, whenever I feel the pull of that kind of thread, I remember the hollow feeling of closing the browser at 1 a.m., and I don't open it. Those saved hours have, cumulatively, written two essays, three long letters to old friends, and one apology that actually mattered.