The sun goes down at 5:23pm, and the temperature is an unseasonable seventy degrees. The skies feel hungover, damp and grey, which matches my mood. Yesterday a man who smelled like gasoline attempted to enter the Capitol with a flare gun. A few hours later, my country elected another man to do more or less the same. Again.

Materially, my life is the same as before. I trade encouraging nods with joggers as I run my morning laps around the pond. Strangers make room for each other at the supermarket. But my mind is stained with suspicion. Did you vote for him? Did you want this? This is the zone of horror: the inability to see the world as others do and vice versa.

I feel like a fool for allowing myself to hope for a few weeks, mainlining punditry from CNN and The New York Times and The Guardian, assuming we would choose consensus-driven reality over the poisonous feedback loops and silos of the internet, where the extreme left and right have driven each other into madness. But now I must accept that I’m the one who’s been living in a silo because the internet has won.