This topic, I’m sure, has been blogged about and hashed and rehashed a million times, but here it goes anyway. Stream of consciousness about reality TV:

The banality of evil is a well broached subject. However, the banality of existence and subjugation is a topic I have not studied in any extent. We live in an age of relative painlessness.

Do you have a headache? Take an Aspirin™. Diarrhea? Pepto Bismol. Hereticism? Well, not so clear. We live in a state where free speech is valued and (almost) expected. In other countries where publishing my thoughts may be met with a sentence of death, we are fortunate enough to live in the United States, where as long as it’s not blatantly subversive to the common good, it’s allowed.

Anyway, back to my main topic of reality TV. One of the primary side-effects of this unobstructed freedom is the subconscious realization that life without pain is 100% boring.

And how else do we cope with this boredom in a country constricted on all sides by the media? We delve into the abyss that is reality TV. In this comfort we find our humanity: fear, danger, pain, and discomfort.

With that random bit of jagged thought, I leave you with this, a quote from Alduos Huxley’s A Brave New World:

Said the Controller (authority figure in the Utopian society in the book):

“We prefer to do things comfortably.”
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” There was a long silence.
“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.