Let’s make a pact. The next person who whines about how The Simpsons sucks gets flung in a well. The rest of us can tailgate. Spare us your blustery, pedantic indignation. There’s nothing to add. No petition long enough, no outcry loud enough. Winter is coming (word to Game of Thrones), and so is the Fox series’ 23rd season and 500th episode. If this really upsets you, here’s bismuth for your bellyache: Just. Quit. Watching.

Elegant, no? And if your OCD completism gives you acid-reflux burps at the idea of being a quitter, try thinking of it another way.

You’re not failing to watch the entirety of a television show so much as you are dismissing it for cause. This television show has failed to meet your reasonably high, oscillating yet perfectly calibrated standards. Preemptively dissatisfied by the upcoming Steve Carell-free season of The Office? Well, sure. But nobody asked you to look into its jaundiced, gluey eyes and pat its strawlike mane while you apologize and then shoot the lumbering beast. Besides, you don’t get to. Season eight is happening whether you like it or not. Just stop leading that stupid horse into your house. And absolutely do not give it a carrot while loudly complaining that it’s overfed. Quit!

This applies to AMC’s The Killing, which I binned midseason for its abject whateverishness. (The season finale didn’t fix that, huh?) Same for How I Met Your Mother and its relentless sluggishness. Lyndsy Fonseca, cast to play the daughter as an adolescent, has since appeared on Maxim’s Hot 100. Twice. Time to move on.

This does not count as intellectual incuriosity. Don’t get exercised worrying, as critics at The New York Times did recently, about whether you’re eating enough cultural vegetables. I think we can all agree that this particular flavor of television doesn’t even chart on the brain-food pyramid. It’s glaze on a fried pie. Or, to put it another way: You’re not allowed to be offended that there’s nothing to buy in the SkyMall catalog.

Don’t like The Simpsons? Watch Bob’s Burgers. Don’t like Bob’s Burgers? Try to cope. Somehow. Don’t like a single show that’s on television right now? Fire your cable company and dance the languid, naked freedom dance of someone who isn’t eviscerated monthly by those douche-hole gerrymandering oligopolists.

And let’s face it, you complain if shows exceed their sell-by date, but you complain when they end, too. Even the most universally beloved, game-changing shows were acclaimed for their ambitious, long-arc ways and then lambasted for the ways they tied up loose ends. X-Files. Seinfeld. Lost. The Sopranos. St. Elsewhere. Really? It was all a snow-globe-induced autistic hallucination? Wow. Definitely worth a golf clap for the enormous balls required to go out in such confidently facile fashion. Ha-ha. Psych! Fin.

Basically, we media addicts sort of suck at endings. Writing them. Watching them. Being remotely satisfied by the best of them. Did they stick the landing? Who knows? We’re so compulsively sophisticated that we can’t let the damn gash scab over. There will always be a bereftness, a phantom limb that we reach to stroke like the pet log in Twin Peaks (quit halfway through season two). In any relationship, long-term or otherwise, you’re only ever one dead-eyed declaration away from dunzo. The dumpee doesn’t have to accept the breakup for it to take. End it before you resent it. TV is supposed to be a respite from the burden of human interaction, not another dysfunctional relationship.

Besides, there’s always the option of one last fling with an ex—sloppily, guiltily finishing shows on streaming sites long after they’ve stopped airing. Years after that messy breakup, go back for more, this time with managed expectations, knowing exactly when and vaguely how it’ll all end. Hell, do it with a fresh, new show on in the background. Live it up.