One of the greatest functions of pop culture is to make ourselves feel better about our lives. I can think of no other reason that shows like A&E's Intervention and MTV's True Life exist. Sure we have a fascination for watching and in some ways experiencing the way the other half lives, but our preference for these shows highlights something much more important in our society: our need to feel better than someone or someone else.
Admittedly, when I watch an episode of Intervention and I see a girl my age who is jobless, homeless, shamless, and shoots five to ten bags of heroin a day while popping Xanax like they are candy, I feel a lot better about my indecision about what to do after I graduate college. Is it wrong to feel this way? To a certain degree, yes, but it gives me a sort of confidence and power to realize that things are not as bad as they seem.
As another example, when my mother watches Jon and Kate Plus 8, she feels significantly less stressed. Sure she might have 100 emails to answer, patients to see, and lectures to develop, but somehow when she sees how Kate deals with 8 children under the age of ten without her head spinning off, she feels at ease. No matter what she is feeling at that moment, she could imagine having all the responsibilities of being a parent eight times over and realize that answering a few emails and seeing some patients isn't really that bad.
Society looks to the people we see in various documentaries of other "normal" non-celebrities to boost our self confidence. To a certain extent it is an exploitation of another human being. We are saying that we do not really care or relate to their problem or illness in anyway, we are watching it to realize that it can always be worse. These shows are aired so that we as viewers may feel a certain amount of empathy for the people being documented, however, rarely do we feel empathetic. Rather, we feel empowered, like any challenge we may face we will be able to overcome because it is probably not so great of a challenge in the grand scheme of things.
Our society also does this with television sitcoms. When our favorite cast member undergoes a trying time, we use this as a justification for the meagerness of our trying times. Even though the people who play these characters experience none of these issues and the events are entirely fictional, there is part of us that still takes them to be true and applies them to our lives as if they were true. If we as a society take these events and use them to increase our self esteem, the boundary between what is real and what is fiction is significantly blurred. TV is no longer TV, it has become a reality for us, much like an episode of Intervention or True Life. We are willing to justify the legitimacy of something so long as it makes us feel "good."
Should something make us feel bad, for example hearing the world will end in 2012, we choose not to listen to it and to write this off as being "fake." I am not an expert in any of these doomsday predictions, but I would imagine that there are some writings from Nostradamus, the Mayans, and others that have some loose association with it. Either way, they are significantly more "real" than, say, an episode of Gossip Girl. However, because such programs tell us something we do not want to hear or something that makes us feel worse about ourselves or uneasy about our lives, we choose to discredit its validity.
Society, then, is in some ways backwards. We take to heart things that are unreal and push to side those things that may be real but upset us. In this way, we highlight ourselves as being entirely self-serving creatures who will look and appreciate only those things that make us feel good.
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