It blows my mind that there are people who don’t believe others deserve the basic right to privacy. So many people in media authority make immense profits off of the most useless and manufactured celebrity gossip. Glutting mainstream newshubs with this empty information tells the masses that world conflicts and political corruption are of no concern when baby scares and wedding fiascos exist. It commodifies the human experience to a systematic extent—how are we supposed to escape it? It’s a bafflingly cynical line of work.

While heinous acts of terror and rape deserve to be dealt with accordingly, celebrity gossip culture places all forms of human fallacy—from murder to making fun of another grown human person with a fully developed brain on the internet—under the same umbrella. The real problems hold the same magnitude as adolescent he-said-she-said. It only promotes a crippling twenty-first century hypersensitivity and, at times, viciously targets people who, in the grand scheme of things, never actually hurt anyone. Getting distracted by these meaningless items only allows the real offenders to scurry away scot-free in the meantime.

For the people receiving the feed, keeping up on such “news” can become an addiction. As human beings, we are all faced with varying levels of insecurity regarding our inherently selfish and prideful nature. Seeing a person in power who has done a supposedly “bad thing,” no matter the magnitude, tears down the curated, perfect image that stood so prominently before. The true, flawed nature of man is put on full display. It elicits almost a sense of pride in the lowly observer, who now feels superior than the persona-person for having not committed the same crime—or, in the most likely case, not getting caught doing the same thing. With enough repetition, the hypocrisy becomes commonplace and irremovable. As long as the happy buttons in the brain are being pressed in time with those on the “volume up” control, all is good from the armchair. Nothing of actual substance gets done, and the world keeps on disintegrating as usual. What the observer fails to realize is that no-one is inherently better than another, for we are all sitting here waiting for the earth to be consumed by the sun, preaching the gospel while whipping ourselves for our sins behind closed doors.