IT’S BEEN A FEW MONTHS (ages in internet time), but for me, the clip was one of those moments that stands still in the frantic rush of everyday information overload. You really need to watch it to get the full effect, but if you don’t have time, here’s the rundown. Comedian Louis C.K. is on Conan, and he’s talking about smartphones.

“You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there. That’s being a person. Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty—forever empty. That knowledge that it’s all for nothing and that you’re alone. It’s down there.

And sometimes when things clear away, you’re not watching anything, you’re in your car, and you start going, ‘oh no, here it comes. That I’m alone.’ It’s starts to visit on you. Just this sadness. Life is tremendously sad, just by being in it… That’s why we text and drive. I look around, pretty much 100 percent of the people driving are texting. And they’re killing—everybody’s murdering each other with their cars. But people are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don’t want to be alone for a second, because it’s so hard.”

Towards the end he says this:

“The thing is, because we don’t want that first bit of sad, we push it away with a little phone or a jack-off or the food. You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel kinda satisfied with your product, and then you die.

Wait, I thought this was comedy? We laugh—bitterly. He got us.

I haven’t just seen it; I’ve felt it. That restless feeling when I approach a stoplight. That urge to check Twitter when I’m playing Duplos with my little boy. That temptation to bury my anxieties in the pull-to-refresh slot machine of my email app.

I think Louis C.K. is onto something—something incredibly profound that very few people have the self-awareness and honesty to pinpoint. But for all his insight, he only gets halfway.

The smartphone addiction he so perfectly describes is the same thing we’ve been doing for thousands of years with food, and sex, and sports, and retail therapy, and knitting, and thousands of other things—good though they are in their right place. Except they don’t live in our pockets, reminding us with every buzz that there’s something new, something better to dull the pain.

Louis C.K. says at the end of the clip that once he decided to just let the sadness come and really feel it. He was surprised how human and honest it felt, and found that a sort of happiness rose to meet it. And he’s right: we can’t just medicate unpleasant feelings away. But just feeling our feelings—happy or sad—isn’t enough. We need to face ourselves, and then go beyond ourselves, and finally come to terms with that “forever empty” itself.

This is the hinge on which our lives turn, and where Louis C.K. tragically misses the point. Because there is an answer. There really is something to fill the yawning emptiness, to finally close the wound. We were made for better than work-life balance and sex and food and video games, “kinda satisfied” ‘till death do us part.

The plethora of half-pleasures point back to their Originator. Every derivative joy is a latent longing for home, a yearning for the Artist behind the beauty. We were made for a Person, and that Person is Jesus Christ, God incarnate.

He is the God-man who stepped into the sadness and loneliness of our world, to rescue us, to redeem us, to remake us. He is the great Source of the fountain that can quench our desperate thirst, the Home we all long for.

It’s not all for nothing. You’re not alone. You were made for more. As the 4th century saint Augustine famously wrote, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”