Help! I can’t stop rooting for the stock market to fall.

I am a heretic, an economic masochist, a traitor to my industry and my country. When the Dow Jones Industrial Average starts falling, I hope it keeps falling. I am a man who roots for the stock market to go down.

Forgive me, capitalism, for I have sinned.

I, like the rest of America, find myself entranced by the Dow. Those little green numbers on the bottom right of a cable-news screen are like a dangling stopwatch, hypnotizing me with every swing up and down. Just before I check on the market’s closing number, the anticipation is like the one felt before opening a present from Santa. What has this mysterious and invisible force left me with this time? Mommy, Santa got me a financials sell-off! To run out one more tired but apt analogy, our national fascination is the equivalent of rubbernecking. How can you not look at the most awe-inspiring car crash you will ever see in your life?

But here’s the thing: I can’t help but want as many cars to crash as possible. Especially on days like Monday, when the Dow’s futures are already trading down, the overseas markets have deflated overnight, and major economic news takes up prime real estate on the nation’s front pages. I get excited for the potential carnage and bored when it isn’t realized. Just now, as I’m writing, the market ticked up 60 points. Somewhere in my head, an ashamed voice murmured disappointment. I am not proud of this instinct, but a moderate loss seems too nuanced, too undramatic, too cautious for an economic crisis that could be my generation’s defining characteristic. Every time the Dow declines, we take one step further on our journey into the unreal and the unknown. I can’t help but be excited.

Much of my schadenfreude has to do with curiosity. I want to see what happens next. The decline of this economy has been a breathtaking, historic sight. Jobless numbers continually outstrip pessimists’ predictions, and GDP numbers are being revised to even lower levels than originally anticipated. Every day, we watch the destruction of an economy that was built on stilts. Nobody knows how long before the dust settles and what it will look like after the collapse.

And in these terms, a moderate, U-shaped recession is, frankly, boring. As a Slate colleague said to me, there’s no glory in just having a couple of banks fail. We want history. We want to go where no generation has gone before. We want to bounce grandkids on our lap and tell them folksy anecdotes about 70-percent-off sales, the Dow being 50+ percent off its all-time high, and the day print media died.