Through the years, there have been numerous fiery, thoughtful takedowns discussing how Sex and the City pushes an unreachable, impossible (and possibly irresponsible) lifestyle predicated on a lie. I have read those articles, and I respect those articles. And when the new SATC series, And Just Like That, debuts, I’m sure we’ll get a bunch of new ones.

But I’m not convinced that we need those articles. Because just as deer are born knowing how to walk and salmon hatch knowing that someday they’ll have to swim upstream, we humans are all born with an innate, God-given knowledge that Sex and the City is totally fake. Everyone, including infants, honeybees, medium-sized domestic cats, and ghosts who have been dead for 200 years, know that Sex and the City is totally fake.

If you showed an episode of Sex and the City to the colonial-era ghost who haunts your laundry room, she’d be like “Why is this editor at Vogue giving up hours of her day to have a face-to-face meeting with a freelancer whose writing she doesn’t even like, when everyone knows that if you’re a freelancer and your editor doesn’t like your article, she just stops returning your emails and pretends she doesn’t see you when you’re in line next to each other at Sephora?” It is that fake.

I say that Sex and the City is fake not as an insult, but as a simple acknowledgement of a crucial part of its DNA. SATC was not created to be relatable to any human being who has ever lived, including Candace Bushnell herself. It’s a glamorous, pastel-colored fantasy where life is easy, romance is plentiful, and writing a sex column in a free local newspaper that people only read on the subway or the toilet somehow makes you a celebrity.