Like plenty of other people (perhaps particularly other beagle-fanciers), I loved Andrew Sullivan’s blog The Dish in most of its various incarnations over the years, and I read it eagerly even when, as was very often the case, I disagreed with the author. I was disappointed when he rather ostentatiously announced his retirement from blogging last year, so I was naturally interested when I saw that he commanded the cover article spot of the September 19 issue of New York magazine, a piece called “I Used to Be a Human Being.” It went into the piece eagerly.

And almost instantly regretted it, and then kept on regretting it throughout the length of the piece. Instead of reading the piece I’d hoped for, in which Sullivan looked back on his whirlwind years masterminding The Dish, I realized pretty quickly I was reading a piece in which Sullivan recounts his struggles with the Devil.

He’s visiting a religious retreat that’s geared to wean people from their dependence on electronic stimulation. Postulants surrender their cellphones and meditate their way through the cold turkey withdrawal symptoms to a state of inner peace. They’re slowly, patiently desensitized until they reach the point where they can ignore all the “distractions” of modern technology and concentrate again on not concentrating, on simply breathing, on simply being.

Those distractions were stronger for Sullivan than for most people, as he writes in typically vivid prose:

But the rewards were many: an audience of up to 100,000 people a day; a new-media business that was actually profitable; a constant stream of things to annoy, enlighten, or infuriate me; a niche in the nerve center of the exploding global conversation; and a way to measure success – in big and beautiful data – that was a constant dopamine bath for the writerly ego. If you had to reinvent yourself as a writer in the internet age. I reassured myself, then I was ahead of the curve. The problem was that I hadn’t been able to reinvent myself as a human being.

And he claims that all of this extracted a heavy cost: lethargy, atrophied muscles, “four bronchial infections in 12 months” and a general feeling of disconnection from the world. Sullivan lists all the usual suspects: Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, Tinder (that one crops up regularly), combines them with the round-the-clock needs of running The Dish, and paints a dire picture of the results:

Every hour I spent online was not spent in the physical world. Every minute I was engrossed in a virtual interaction I was not involved in a human encounter. Every second absorbed in some trivia was a second less for any form of reflection, or calm, or spirituality. I either lived as a voice online or I lived as human being in the world that humans had lived in since the beginning of time.

Like all people who convince themselves they’re addicts, Sullivan promptly does two things: he declares that he had no control over his addiction – and that none of us do: “When provided a constant source of information and news and gossip about each other – routed through our social networks – we are close to helpless” – and he turns around and heaps scorn on the Promised Land now that he’s sure he himself doesn’t want to live there anymore. He describes a great, frantic blight ruled by shadowy overlords:

We absorb this “content” (as writing or video or photography is now called) no longer primarily by buying a magazine or paper, by bookmarking our favorite website, or by actively choosing to read or watch. We are instead guided to these info-nuggets by myriad little interruptions on social media, all cascading at us with individually tailored relevance and accuracy. Do not flatter yourself in thinking that you have much control over which temptations you click on. Silicon Valley’s technologists and their ever-perfecting algorithms have discovered the form of bait that will have you jumping like a witless minnow.

It’s preposterous, of course, but the whole thing is preposterous. Phony screeds like this one are zero-sum games that practically write themselves, and it’s disappointing that Sullivan doesn’t bother to rise above the formula (there are potted blocks of exposition about Internet growth, the religious life, and, Gawd help us, the invention of the printing press). He makes mechanical references to Thoreau and to comedian Louis C.K.’s idiotic rant on a late-night TV show, talks about how when you take a subway ride these days, everybody’s attention is glued to their glowing little screens, gets in some references to the pretty blue sky … all of it so by-the-numbers that I found myself just waiting for the tell-tale signs of outright hypocrisy. Those signs are always the same: the writer elevates the tedium and waste of the Good Olde Days into some kind of Golden Age when people really did things and really paid attention. “Yes, online and automated life is more efficient, it makes more economic sense, it ends monotony and ‘wasted’ time in the achievement of practical goals,” he writes. “But it denies us the deep satisfaction and pride of workmanship that comes from accomplishing daily tasks well …” And so on.

There was no satisfaction in wasting an hour trying to find that particular used bookshop in a city where you’ve never been. There was no satisfaction in being completely stranded if your car has a flat tired on a side road at night. There was no pride of workmanship in crawl-typing through carbon papers in order to get four pages of clean copy. All of that is nonsense, and Sullivan knows it’s nonsense (the piece ends as they all do, with him inching back, with hand-waving reluctance, to the world of electronic ‘distractions’). He can go to as many ostentatious yuppie “retreats” as he wants, but he wouldn’t go back again to missing important phone calls or being out of touch with his loved ones – or getting lost, ever – if his life depended on it. He’s cashing a New York paycheck by decrying something he never stopped using and praising things that did nothing but irritate him when they were the only games in town. All of it is just the click-bait harrumphing of a middle-aged man aping an old man.

Witless minnows? Nobody made Sullivan click on anything. Nobody made him abandon his self-control in such a ridiculous, adolescent way. Nobody made him hunch over his computer without taking breaks to walk, or talk, or fight off bronchitis. And likewise nobody made him walk away from it all, as mystifying as that decision was. Through talent and skill and a great deal of hard work, he built The Dish into something truly remarkable; if he needed time off from it in order to unwind, he should have booked a cruise or hiked the Appalachian Trail or showed a little more creative commitment to to Tinder. He’d have come back refreshed to the job he rightly celebrates as having been thrilling and satisfying … and the rest of us would have been spared Pollyanna bull crap like “I Used To Be a Human Being.”