The Beautiful People Are Ugly, Too

I have been taking a sociology class at the same time I have been taking this class and it has been interesting to see how topics and occasionally even examples line up in the two classes. It has also led me to have a sort of overall theory on the state of our society in terms of both media and national attitude. So for the remainder of these blogs, I am going to talk about that. This one will specifically cover TV (more specifically reality TV).

We talked about reality TV recently (and on and off throughout the semester) and why people watch it. I haven't really spent much time with reality TV outside of random episodes of American Idol and Last Comic Standing that my parents would have on and a night of watching a Moonshiners marathon this last summer, but from what I've seen and what I've heard about these shows, it's all about laughing at the stars. I was watching this clip from Conan recently and it made me think.

These reality shows are really sad. It's all about looking into people's lives that are worse than our own and laughing and thinking "boy is my life better than theirs". Even if your life is miserable, you can look at these shows and feel ok. This is both a good and a bad thing. It's good because you don't feel as miserable, but it also breeds complacency. If your only goal in life is to be "better" than the stars (for lack of a better word) on the reality shows, then you have a crappy life. I have way higher goals for that in my life. I would much rather spend time studying people who have done things I want to accomplish than what I want to avoid.

But back to my original point. Our nation is incredibly insecure. We aren't the biggest and baddest nation out there anymore, our economy is still recovering, stuff is getting expensive, and our planet is getting worse. We want to look at these people as entertainment to make ourselves feel better. We watch reality TV for the same reasons kids bully other kids, to feel powerful and better about us. Instead of trying to do better and accomplish things, we want to set our bars so low that just not being laughed at on national TV is an accomplishment.