Kittens, babies, and pornography are the most popular content on the Internet because they allow emotionally repressed people opportunities to express feelings without admitting any tenderness or vulnerability in the process.

Following in close second is content that induces outrage, resentment, grievance, and despair, for similar reasons. It lets us redirect our feelings of helplessness and our feelings of entitlement towards a broad enough target that we don't have to take responsibility for our feelings. At its worst, it also encourages a self-righteousness that lets us judge and condemn the people in our real lives while convincing ourselves that we are not doing the condemnation. In fact, the choice to judge is out of our hands altogether.

In third place, we get what I like to call "the illusion of control." This includes political conspiracies, fandom pedantries, and the sort of faux-science that offers endless information on authoritative-sounding subjects: dopamine and depression, ADHD and autism, alternative medicine, and anything else that you probably shouldn't be "researching" using Instagram. (Personality assessments like astrology and Meyers-Briggs fall into this bucket as well.)

In an increasingly disconnected age, where we are alienated from each other and from ourselves—from our feelings, from our labor, from our futures, and even from the things that, once upon a time, we'd have gotten to call our own—we have found clever ways to atomize the human experience, replicating what it feels like to live without the messy inconvenience of actually needing to be alive. We've replaced the complicated fibers of being human with sugar water, switching out the trickiness of genuinely learning for the ease of feeling knowledgable,manipulating our own emotions like a switchboard without bothering to let the emotions stand in for something more deeply and sincerely personal.

Far from sparing us from vulnerability, it leaves us more vulnerable than ever: we've got no topsoil, we fail to put down roots. We're electrified and absorbed by every little spark of chaos and distraction, because we have no insulation whatsoever, no grounding to help keep us focused. We all know this, on some level. We know this has a cost. But the cost is too diffuse, too broad in scope, to easily focus on, and already we've swiped to the next thing, we're playing the next song, we're appalled and horny and giggling and cooing and furious and depressed, we're liking and commenting and sharing, we're reacting, and a week from now we'll see it all again and it'll already feel like nostalgia, because who remembers everything they saw an hour ago, who remembers anything, who has anything worth remembering?

Maybe we dream, if we dream, of not remembering remembering at all, which could mean either orgasm or apocalypse, or likely both at once. We claim to dread the end of the world, but we make those claims in a tone of voice which suggests, perversely enough, that dread is the closest thing we've found to hope. Do we really fear that future will be hell and damnation and oblivion, or is it that the present, the endless present, is the hell and the oblivion that we claim to fear? It's more comfortable to pretend that it's a moment yet to come, safer to claim a doomed future than a doomed present. It certainly explains why fantasies of release, fantasies of all of this ending, feel so appealing, terrifying as they might seem. But release from what? An end to what? Aww, look! This kitten's made an unlikely friend!