Born in 1963, died 2016 – alas poor Sex. We knew you well. Well, not WELL. We knew you. Slightly. That was a good summer.

But it was with great regret and some tears that last week we learned of your death. All of us will remember where we were when we heard, of course – we were not having you. We were sitting on sofas, TV on, loungewear on, jointly scrolling through our phones for more updates on what the millennials are thinking, eating Doritos.

There was a time when we all thought you were eternal, that pursuit of you was vital to our humanity – “wars and lechery”, morning, night, how foolish we were. Of course a day would come when somebody would invent something better, like a game where you had to throw pretend balls at invisible monsters. You gave off such heat – of course a day would come when you burned out.

But why? Why have young people stopped having you? Why have they stopped building their lives around you, the peg their tents were tied to, the mistakes they yearned to make? Why have you died just when, some would argue, we needed you most?

Was it simply that you asked for too much? Once, in nostalgia days, it’s said it was enough to just screw for fun. Today the expectation is not just that our bodies must be constantly depilated and toned and crop-topped in case you surprised us with a glance on the train, not just that you are something we are expected to learn like algebra, first from lists in Cosmopolitan and then from online amateur videos six links deeper than you expected to dig, but also that our identities must sprout from you. That our fashion, our politics must come from you, that our communities, that our whole lives must focus on you. Forget pleasure, forget intimacy – ozone-like, you became everything. And then something broke.

Is it that you got cocky, falling for your own hype? You saw your name scrawled on bus stops, the way you were called upon to sell both perfume and cat food, and you thought: they love me, the world is mine.

But, we see now, you had one hit, and you traded on it for too long. Your arrogance meant you thought nothing could beat the thrill of you, but you didn’t account for the enduring allure of old colleagues Anxiety and Depression, nor for better telly, or bigger risks; you failed to pick up on the mood change of the fans, of the generation. And like an ageing pop star whose rider has grown to be bigger than her career (1x basket of white kittens, 100 blue Smarties arranged into hexagons, 1x person employed to hold a strawberry-filtered torch over all memories of virginities lost) you forgot what really mattered.

If only you’d taken the time to strip everything back, to spend a year in the woods, returning to the art, perhaps you’d still be here today.

Like the print industry, you took too long to embrace the digital revolution, obsessed as you were with tits and bums and candlelight. Like Corbyn, you refused to compromise with the media. Every seven seconds you thought only of yourself. You had a one-track mind.

Like the print industry, you took too long to embrace the digital revolution, obsessed with tits and bums

Meanwhile, young people (traditionally your biggest supporters) found other things to entertain them. Their phones replaced the places you used to live – cinemas, parties, the office late at night. Tinder replaced tenderness, and rather than evolve, you became trapped behind those screens – you live twice removed from any touchable skin. You exist now only in words, aubergine emojis and the bedrooms of the over-60s, people not drowning in body anxiety, or hyperventilating with stress about making rent on a freelance career in app development. You are not compatible with a shared room on a rolling lease, with a person who feels unwhole without a filter.

One day we’ll look back at you, Sex, as a much-loved but frivolous game, much as our ancestors must have done at jousting, or the lost art of dice. And we’ll marvel that you lived so long, that you inspired such art, such death. But you made your bed, Sex, and now you have to lie in it. RIP.

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman