Unpopular opinion: Leaving A Group Chat Without A Formal Speech Should Be Banned

Each week, someone in my circle slips out of a group conversation after dark and leaves a small grey system notice for the rest of us to discover. Shameful conduct. In a sensible nation with any moral spine, it would earn six months of road sweeping. Victorian people wrote three pages of polite correspondence to decline an invitation to inspect a neighbour’s prize marrow. A telephone owner can produce a short farewell before shutting the digital door.

Thursday evening did it for me. In my extended family’s culinary planning group, a man called Donald Fallowfield disappeared between two messages about cheese crust. He had joined two years earlier for the scalloped-potato discussion and had remained, until then, a dependable stakeholder in dairy discourse. Then the screen reported that Donald had left quietly. No bow, no thanks, no explanation. Just an automated record of desertion.

That silence matters. A group chat is not a municipal bus, where passengers get off at the traffic lights because the conversation has become tedious. It is a digital drawing room, entered by consent and held together by shared inconvenience. Leaving without a word is like knocking over a lamp, crawling through the shrubbery and fleeing into the cabbage patch. Allow this, and people will soon leave weddings halfway through the vows to buy a sandwich.

“A society that tolerates silent chat departures is a society ripe for utter collapse.” — Gary Opinions, Senior Columnist for Domestic Decorum and Household Grudges

Donald’s escape has clarified the law I plan to put before the town clerk. Any messaging circle with three or more people should require two weeks’ notice before a member departs. During that fortnight, the outgoing participant must settle conversational debts, including neglected acknowledgements of pet photographs. They must also appoint somebody to laugh at the recurring internet jokes. Morale is a fragile thing in these rooms.

There must also be a ceremony. Before the exit button becomes available, the applicant should read a resignation statement into the device microphone. An accredited municipal witness would certify it, perhaps Horace Pringle, Chief Notary of the Parish Veranda. His task is simple: establish whether the person has sound reasons for abandoning the group, or has merely taken offence during an argument about gravy.

Some critics will say life is busy, and that a thread about a cousin’s lost umbrella amounts to psychological torture. Nonsense. Civic duty has never been designed for comfort. If you lack the stamina for eighty consecutive photographs of a moderately unusual butternut squash, you should not have accepted the invitation in the first place.

For now, the ministry has provided neither exit tariffs nor digital border guards. I will therefore enforce basic manners myself. Anyone who leaves one of my correspondence threads in secret will find their front garden picketed at dawn, while I read their unread messages through a brass megaphone until they return. You entered voluntarily. The parish council will decide when you leave.