Why other users defend it

It came from somebody still using, and it caught you completely off guard. A joke about how long this is going to last. A raised eyebrow at the water in your hand. Or the speech, delivered slightly too fast, about how their grandmother lived to ninety and it is not as bad as everyone says and life is for living. You did not bring it up. They did. You were sitting there being perfectly fine, and somehow that alone was enough to start it, and you turned it over the whole drive home.

None of it was about you. You were a mirror, not a target. Everyone still in it carries a version of a plan to stop, filed under later, and later stays comfortable exactly as long as nobody demonstrates that now is available. Then you walk in, unbothered, ordinary, and their timeline quietly becomes a decision they are actively making rather than one still waiting to happen. That is what got disturbed. The words came out pointed at you because you were the nearest surface in the room.

Which is why the argument cannot be won, and why it is not worth attempting. You are not being contradicted. You are being negotiated with, by someone who wants a small piece of permission from you and has no idea that is what they are asking for. Debate them and you hand over exactly what they came for: a fight they can lose, which is far easier to carry home than the memory of a person quietly doing it. Say little. Stay warm. Let the evidence sit there.

So your response is much smaller than you think. No case, no statistics, no story about how you did it unless they sincerely ask for it. Something plain and unbothered, then a change of subject, because you have other things to talk about now. Be kind about it. That was you not very long ago, saying those same sentences to somebody who had just stopped. Pray for them instead of correcting them, and leave the door open. Some of them will walk through it and never tell you why.