I tend not to watch TV - movies yes, but not so much TV. I'd rather program or read. I'm with Frackal on this, I look around and I see these people and I find it amusing.
Think of it in terms of all the animals in the world. The whole basis of life on Earth is the struggle for survival. Lions only eat what they can run down and catch in the hunt. Humans in well developed nations don't need to do that, they have supermarkets - they trade denominations of a monetary system in order to get the food. It has been shown that apes will build tools to improve their ability to get more food (not power tools obviously, but employing sticks and such to increase the rate at which they can get food). Humans break into different groups and one of those groups will then get that food using elaborate tools, which they purchase with the money. That thought process evetually leads to disease - if an elephant is born with a malform leg, or if its brain is essetially dumber than the rest of its herd, or if its body uses too much water too quickly - then it will die. Either directly from the problem at hand, or it will be too slow when times of necessity arise and it will get caught and eaten. Humans have invented medicine - so diseases and genetic mistakes are remaining and then working their way back into the gene pool.
All of that combined leads to a consumer based society where people no longer have a threat against them, and instead have idle time where they need to pass it. It leads to depression, boredom, and missplaced aggression.
Watching people worrying about clothes, make up, and implants has to be as amusing to other cultures as it is for us to look at African tribes where they use rings to extend their necks or plates to expand their lips.
blah blah blah - I'm rambling.
anyway - Frackal - you are just describing the condition that is cultural evolution - the less work that needs to be done, the more idle time there is and there will be ways to fill it and a market exists where it consists solely of devices to occupy that time. is it good or bad? depends on how you look at it - but considering it has been in place for some time and it is the atmosphere that we live in - instead of fighting it, perhaps it would be better to look at the people around you, that walk about oblivious to the way they don't see the world and think to yourself how you can exploit them. I'm not saying kidnap them and use them as slave labor - not that kind of exploitation - but in the way that they are essentionally malleable minds walking around connected to money - and money is what society dictates that we need to move higher in the eyes of others... so mold them into something that gets you the money. find something that the mindless masses want, and the more universal it is, the more money you will make.
and my comment above about genetic mistakes getting propigated back into the gene pool is likely going to get misconstrued, but I assure you that I had no intention of proposing some Hitler-esque ideas.
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