Michael Brendan Dougherty has a truly wonderful final column up at The Week, one that makes me especially regretful that he’ll be moving on.

Try to pinpoint the last time you took a purposeless walk through the late spring breeze, when there was no itch in your hand to reach for a mobile device, and you felt like the wind and sky around you had nothing to disclose to you other than the vast and mysteriously sympathy of existence itself. Was it 2007? Or as far back as 1997? Does just asking the question make you feel ill?

Do you lie awake in bed more often these days, unable to sleep, scrolling through Facebook or Twitter on your phone, trying to ignore signs of stress? Perhaps a faint taste of acid in your mouth? Do you have a gnawing fear that dark alliances are forming among your countrymen and conspiring against you, and everyone you like and (for good measure) everyone like you? Does it make you want to spend more money, or write yourself more reminders to do “self-care?” Maybe you suspect that if anyone else cares about your self it is only to notice that deep down you’re just as much of a hateful loser as they are?

Well, me too. Sometimes. Like the mental-health professional worth paying, I can tell you that what you’re feeling isn’t your fault. But unlike them, I think what you’re feeling might be my fault.

You see, I’m paid to write about politics and culture on the internet.

In a very perceptive essay, Will Rahn argued that everybody in America thinks they are losing. Liberals look out on the world and see the Democrats defeated and driven to the edge of politics. Conservatives look out on the world and see a Republican Party that can win elections but can’t change the culture. “No matter where we stand ideologically, everyone in the mainstream gets the sense that we’ve somehow already lost, that some past battle has already decided the long war’s outcome in our opponents’ favor,” Rahn writes.

There are any number of reasons why people feel this way, historical and political. But one of the main reasons they feel like this is because of the internet, particularly social media’s effect on the way news is created and delivered to you. And how all of this has warped the experience of those who have lived through these social changes. It isn’t just about politics either, but almost every dimension of human experience. Do you love architecture? Someone just built a monstrosity next to a building you loved. Click here. Do you adore products by Apple? Well, they’re screwing them up. Click here. Did you just feel that unnamable, almost unmentionable surge of gratitude for all the people you’ve known in life and all the kindnesses their presence brought to you? Click here and see that most of them have contemptibly dumb opinions about everything.

The internet doesn’t coddle you in a comforting information bubble. It imprisons you in an information cell and closes the walls in on you by a few microns every day. It works with your friends and the major media on the outside to make a study of your worst suspicions about the world and the society you live in. Then it finds the living embodiments of these fears and turns them into your cell mates. And good heavens it is efficient.

So what can one do?

I’d recommend the Luddite solution. But I probably can’t convince anyone to smash their screens for good. Not even myself. Individual acts of rebellion might be cathartic but not useful. We probably can’t change the way the world feels to us now. The night sky that seemed to transmit nothing to us but sympathy back in 1997 is now conveying this ugly, boring, contemptible “content” to your device at this very moment. It is hiding all of that anxiety beneath just enough funny videos of people being injured, or pictures of someone’s baby or cat, or pleasant time lapses of cooking that you keep coming back to it. If you gave up your device, your friends would still approach you with theirs.

“Did you see this?” they ask. “Do I want to?” you respond with an expectant smile. But internally your mind repeats it with a sigh. “No, really, do I want to?”

Everyone participates in the culture, even if they don’t want to participate. In his book, Beyond Consolation, the Irish writer John Waters spoke about the omnipresence of this culture:

Any attempt to make visible the culture is partly doomed to failure, because it moves and shifts all the time, being governed by the desires and prejudices and terrors of all its members and what they want each other and the world in general to believe about them. I give my tithe to the culture every living moment, feeding into it what I want it to know about me, what I would like it to relate about me, but also much that I do not intend to betray. I blush, an involuntary function, and the culture understands this far more than anything I have said. And the same is true of everyone else, in their relationships with the culture, so the result is something we cannot even begin to describe but at best can acquire an intuitive sense of. [Beyond Consolation]

I pay my tithes, too. If this is a culture of disconnection, anxiety, and flashes of blinding hatred, I must have fed into it somehow. Maybe more so, because I try to describe it and tame it with my words. I don’t know how to get us through it, that feeling of losing and precarity that stalks us on the internet.

But I can grant you permission to stop consuming “content” wherever possible. Just resist its pull. Stop reading my column if you must. After all, this is how you got Trump. Thanks Obama. Over and out.

I have absolutely no intention of stopping reading him — but I do hope he continues in this wonderfully self-reflective vein as he transitions to a new job producing content for a magazine with far more formal ideological and partisan commitments.