Admit you’ve taken a picture of yourself. Then ask why.

Have you ever taken a selfie? Think about that question for a moment before you answer. Think about the word itself, which was just chosen as the International Word of the Year by Oxford Dictionaries. Surely you’ve taken a picture of yourself before. I have, and it’s usually because a family member wants a picture with me and there’s no one around to help. You reach out, get close, make your best guess at framing, and click away.

But that’s strictly utilitarian stuff. That’s not a word-of-the-year activity. What I’m asking is: Have you ever taken an honest-to-god selfie? Have you ever been alone, in your home or at the gym or even the damn supermarket, and decided that you needed to take a picture of yourself?

A selfie is nothing but a declaration of our loneliness and superficiality. But it’s not a cry for help; it’s a cry for a quick fix, a little hit of dopamine for our egos. Something to keep us chugging along in our semi-permanent state of sadness, a thin balm for our overriding, desperate and insanely unrealistic desire for fame. It’s a symptom of our sickness. It’s the way in which we fail to face our problems.

It’s a good word of the year, though. It’d be like choosing Jersey Shore or Kardashian. It says enough, doesn’t it?

When a person criticizes the Internet, someone else inevitably lists all its great qualities. I believe them; there are a lot of good guys out there, in every category. But then again, I don’tbelieve them. Because in the broader sense, we know what kind of content triumphs. We know what sucks us in, and we know what feeds the bad side of our addiction. There’s no need to name names; the quality speaks for itself, and it’s inescapable.

I think our new reliance on a steady stream of stimuli has messed with our brains. There’s no focus, no patience. We’re frantic hunters for Something Better. We need to mock, we need to snark, we need to bitch, we need to be offended, and then we need to be uplifted in the most anodyne way possible. We need to fabricate depth from the shallow waters. This is the cycle of life on the Internet.

And the selfie is a product of that cycle. The Internet enables the selfie. It’s the drama of the Internet played out on a smaller scale, for people who lack the self-critical impulse that keeps the rest of us from devaluing ourselves. Hell, maybe the selfie people are evolved. Maybe they’ve cast off the last vestiges of shame that keep the rest of us down. But I don’t think so. I think they just represent a less refined version of what the rest of us experience. It’s a raw need for some kind of validation packaged into a photograph. We’re not asking, we’re begging: Keep me safe from the trouble outside the gates.

Choosing selfie as the word of the year is such a brilliant choice because the definition is the same as the thing it symbolizes. The selfie is a snapshot of the West in 2013; melodramatic, gaudy, pitiful and lonely. Begging to be stimulated, begging to be validated, and totally, beautifully screwed.

SHANE RYAN writes for Paste magazine.