How can one video clip encompasses the evils of driving while texting, humankind’s collective soul-crushing loneliness and our attempts to assuage it through technology and also trying to parent mini-consumers in such a landscape? By the very fact that it’s Louis C.K. talking, of course. Also Bruce Springsteen is involved.

“He really gets it, man!” you’re probably saying while watching C.K.’s Conan O’Brien appearance on your iPad while texting your friend in the car (please don’t do that).

On kids with smartphones: “Some parents really struggle with ‘You know… all the other kids have the terrible things so my kid has to…” Yes, let your kid go and be a better example to the s**tty kids. Just cause the other stupid kids have phones doesn’t earn that otherwise my kid has to be stupid or she’ll feel weird.”

“I think it’s just toxic — they don’t look at people when they talk to them and they don’t build the empathy.”

On personhood: “You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away. The ability to just sit there. That’s being a person.”

On using technology to fill the void: “Underneath everything in your life there’s that thing, that… forever empty, you know what I’m talking about? [Editor’s note: Yes.] That knowledge that it’s all for nothing and you’re alone. It’s down there. Sometimes when things clear away, and you’re in your car, and you’re like ‘Ohh, here it comes, that I am alone…’ ”

And then how that leads to texting and driving: “People are willing to risk taking lives and ruining their own because they don’t want to be alone for a second.”

Free yourselves! Unless you’re reading this on your phone and in that case, awesome, but just don’t be driving.

Watch the full clip below:

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