system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How does the internet work?

Whenever I’ve asked this to someone they just give me some nonchalant sentence that goes like “it’s a bunch of servers connected to each other”. I’m 30 and still don’t understand how the internet works exactly.
gpt
if you think of it this way.  the internet is like people relaying messages to each other. 

the computers (or people) want to talk to each other.  but they have no direct way of talking to each other.  

what they do instead is go through intermediaries aka other computers/networking equipment that relay messages to each other.  

if you're in school, and you want to pass a note to your best friend across the room, what to you do?  you write the note, fold it, put a label on it with the name, and pass it to someone next to you, which sees the name, then they pass it to someone else in the direction of your friend, until it reaches your friend.  your friend sees the note, see's the message, sees that it's from you.  and does the reverse to send a message back to you.  

now that is a very rudimentary example of "the internet".  the "internet" there is basically the classroom full of students.  each student is a node in the internet and also a host/client that can send/receive notes as well as pass notes across.  

that's how the internet works.  just a bunch of computers or students that are connected to each other (ie they have some method to transmit data between them, whether it be hand passing notes, talking, sending signals on a wire, etc).