Is life boring because we keep getting bombarded with unreasonable standards of glitz and glamour by the media?

I think it is probably a contributing factor, especially for kids. I want what I see but can probably never attain, so what I have seems trivial in comparison. Therefore I am bored with it all and crave bigger and better.

It definitely contributes. I’ll agree with @rooeytoo on that one. Watching movies all my life I have pined for my life to mirror many of them. Reality is so much duller than that magnificent blend of perfectly timed audio with breath-taking video we call movies. Not that reality is all that bad… just not as brilliant as the movies.

Switching channels is a piece of cake. My tolerance for trivia is about 5 minutes per day. The rest of my time is for the interesting stuff.

Even celebrity lives are much duller than movies or the press make them out to be. You ever work on a film or TV show’s set or recording studio? There is a lot of down time in those places where one basically must wait until the set is dressed/mics properly placed/producer and director finish their chat, etc. etc. Even the stroll down the red carpet and the screams of fans get dull after a while.

And folks like Thom Yorke and George Clooney agree that there’s too much focus on their lives. The media’s job, especially television’s, is to make you feel unhappy with your life so you will purchase what the commercials insist you buy, and so they have no problem with trying to convince you that some celebrity has it better than you. They may have more money, but in my experience, plenty of these people were as lonely, sad, and bored as anyone else.

I quit watching television many years ago, and find myself clueless, yet happy, when people discuss the latest celebrity news or compare the latest new starlets. I don’t feel I am missing anything important, at all.

It depends on what you choose to ignore. I have never been one for tabloid gossip, celebrity worship and the like. It also helps that I have worked with and for a number of extremely wealthy, hot-to-trot types. I have equally worked with down-and-out, troubled, inner-city students. You find out readily that the grass is most certainly not greener on the either side.

They key now, for me, is to translate that experience to my six-year-old daughter.

Keeping her away from celebrity zeitgeist is easy enough for now, but she gradually gets exposed through friends. Even if she legitimately enjoys someone’s music or movies, there’s still a certain amount of hype to overcome.

I decided when we adopted my daughter to talk straight to her from day one. I sugar coat nothing. This goes equally for celebrity culture. For balance, we spend time donating clothes to the Salvation Army, comic books to the Boys & Girls Club and toys to Children’s Hospital.

So far this seems to give her a sense of perspective – While she’s dancing along to Demi Lovato.

Not at all. My life is fantastic and quite honestly, never boring. It helps, probably, that my boyfriend doesn’t buy into those unreasonable standards of beauty. Or perhaps that we are not glued to a TV all day. But if I was glued to the TV, well, it wouldn’t be this life.

Life is only boring if you let it be.

I don’t think those thing make life boring, because you can ignore all of those things and focus on what interests you.

Who is we, kemosabe? 1. I don’t care about celebrities or about what they might or might not have. 2. I am not bored. 3. My life is fun and interesting.

@whatthefluther You aren’t missing a thing.

Celebrities are only for show. Actually, I find their life boring, not my own. Yeah sure, they have money, all the material things they want, but who cares? It’s not material objects that makes life fun.

Necessary? No
A byproduct of our insecurities? Yes

I don’t watch tv unless its to get an update on the local weather, and that’s a minute or two, tops. The reason I don’t follow celebrities is the same reason I don’t feel jealous of other people. They are more fucked up that we realize.

I’ve heard that how easily you are bored is a direct correlation with your level of intelligence. I’m not going to say people that are easily bored are stupid, but then, intelligent people always seem to be able to find something to pique their interest. You decide.

Weather you see them as glamorous, wanting to be a part of it in any way.
Or as f-uped which for me is an action of stroking your own ego.
It all plays a part in our own perception to others and where we stand.

I worked in Hollywood, Jane Fonda, Michael York, George burns. The list goes on and on.
I saw them as no one but people going to work. Not an easy thing to truly accomplish.
Did I get a bit star struck from time to time? Only when a “real” friendship was there.
Or if they showed character that brought their bigger then life persona back down to earth. Those were far and few.
I have my own life, and I have people around me that as “common” as they might be excite the immediate world I live in.

Besides, all I see when I see the glitzy and glamorous, unless in character, as rich people flaunting what they have. It is just disguised as a TV host or Movie Star.
I am not interested.

No.
First, I disagree with your premise. I don’t think life is boring at all, and I don’t think “all we do” is watch TV and worship celebrities.
If someone forgets that TV and celebrity is entertainment, they have bigger problems than being bored.

No, it isn’t boring, although we are awash with celebrity banality, one can avoid the market place. Have you considered stalking a celebrity or shooting a few? that would, i suspect, relieve the tedium, if you managed one or two, i’m sure the frenzy and subsequent increased secuity would make the next hit sufficiently taxing so that boredom would have no further place in your world :)

I don’t know about boring and celebrities, but I do notice that I am bombarded constantly, from morning to night, with people wanting my money. Ads on TV, junk mail, flyers on my front door, telemarketers. Even the county fair has turned into just a big shopping mall. All the things that people try to make you believe you have to have. No wonder we have become a nation of consumers. Do you get up in the morning and think “what should I go buy today?” If you don’t buy something that day, do you feel like you haven’t accomplished anything that day? It is a hard habit to break, but I’m working on it.

Begging the question: Life isn’t boring. If yours is, you need to do something about it.

I think celebrities are boring, so I ignore them. It’s life that’s interesting. I really don’t even know how to be bored.

So many people, in the world today, would love to have the luxury of a “boring” life.

I think the boredom all depends on your perspective when you watch the stuff and how often you watch it. Don’t get me wrong, I watch the occasional celebrity show, like “I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here” (haha), but when I watch I have to keep in mind that these are things that probably won’t ever happen to me. That’s why I try to stay away from stuff like Entertainment Tonight because the things they report are slightly retarded (are they still doing MJ coverage?).

All we do is watch tv and fuel demand for inane celebrities. Is it really as necessary as it’s made out to be?

You do know that you have the ability to change, right? You have the ability to opt out of that facetious false lifestyle. I have done exactly that. You can get TV through the internet or through DVDs with many less (or in my case, zero) commercials. You can choose to not read the full-of-shit Cosmopolitan magazine, or whatever else is trying to convince you to buy it.

When you realize that everyone has an agenda, and that most of the time it is to take away your money, your perspective quickly changes when you see silly advertisements and airbrushed models.

I would argue you perceive life as boring because you don’t take steps to change it.

Life for me is anything but boring. Not being a TV slave means you can enjoy learning and experimenting new things. Just last week I bought a sheep’s fleece from a local farm, and I taught myself how to clean and process it into wool. How fun and unique is that! It’s much more interesting than caring about whose vagina was shown to the world this week.

@dynamicduo: And you get the delightful reaction of shock and horror when you reveal to people that no, you have no idea who the celebrity of the moment is, and no, you’ve never actually seen an episode of Seinfeld or Friends, and no, you really don’t feel like your life is missing anything significant.

I stopped going to a knitting group when the conversation every week revolved around John and Kate and what they had done that week. (They were apparently some kind of reality TV show stars, raising all their kids on national television. I think one week the big drama was that they ran! out! of! MILK!!)

I do watch TV and movies and I don’t find my life boring. OH SNAP!

And no, I don’t just watch the news or the weather or documentaries. I love documentaries and informational shows, but I watch cartoons and Lost and MadTV and of course, all kinds of movies. My life is not boring at all. I’ve always felt that I can entertain myself better than most kids my age. I find reading about random things on Wikipedia entertaining, I find writing books entertaining, I find gardening and looking at maps and Google Earth entertaining, I find listening to music entertaining, reading books, all kinds of things, and that’s just without leaving the house.

I’d imagine what you describe would make life more interesting though it depends upon individual preference.