The common wisdom is not to judge anyone for something as personal and specific as her grieving process, but when Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) responds to the death of her editor with a morose, "And no one even began to tell me what was next for my e-book," it's hard not to cringe.

In "Dead Inside," last night's brilliant episode of Girls, Hannah learns that her editor David Pressler-Goings (John Cameron Mitchell) has died suddenly. In self-professed shock, she shares the news with everyone around her — while also wondering what's next for her e-book memoir, which David was set to publish. For Adam (Adam Driver) — and surely for many Girls viewers — it's occasionally unbearable to watch Hannah appear to shrug off David's death, except in terms of its impact on her career. Does she not have "just one crumb of basic human compassion"?

Hannah is not, as Ray (Alex Karpovsky) goes on to suggest, a "fat-free muffin of sociopathic detachment." Once again, she's simply a reflection of the all-too-human qualities so many of us struggle to suppress. When people criticize Hannah for being an unlikeable character, they're generally responding to her self-involvement. And yes, there are few things more selfish than immediately considering the practical repercussions of a person's death. But it's not sociopathic so much as uncomfortably relatable. It's a feeling nearly everyone has experienced — if not voiced out loud.

Unlike the more tactful among us, Hannah is incapable of keeping her thoughts to herself. She speaks freely, sometimes to her credit, sometimes to babble that, "I actually feel nothing. Like, I literally feel nothing. Like, maybe I'm numb, but I don't even feel numb, I feel nothing." Hannah is not, as Jessa (Jemima Kirke) articulates on Adam's behalf, "callous and disconnected" — at least, not more so than the average person — but she does have a pathological need to share all of her internal thoughts at all times. And a person's internal thoughts, more often than not, return to the simple question of, How does this affect me?

Besides, Hannah is very much a product of her generation (if not its defining voice). In the age of Twitter, we're no longer afforded time to silently grieve. The internet calls for immediate reaction, be it snark or pathos. Hannah and Adam's conflicting reactions to Gawker's insensitive report on David's death speaks to their respective familiarity with online media. Adam is horrified, labeling Gawker writers as sexless losers with a kind of archaic dismissiveness. But Hannah, fully enmeshed in internet culture, understands exactly what Gawker is doing. For a blog, snark — like Hannah's repeated questions about her e-book — is a pragmatic response to death.