Life is great, isn't it? Everyone is beautiful, successful, and funny. Teens have time to party harder than rock stars, are involved in tons of extracurricular activities, and yet are able to get in Ivy League Universities. Middle-aged adults all look like they just turned 30, and when their (extremely dramatic) midlife crisis strikes, well at least it is entertaining for everyone else. And yet, nothing feels so genuine in our reality. Oh yeah! That's not our lives, it's the staged existence of fictional characters. Have we allowed television to replace our conception of reality?

The problem is that we cannot stage our existence in the same way television does in its artificial universe. Life is not a never-ending sequence of parties and adventures,  it is first and foremost a routine. Obviously, if you compare your life to your favourite characters' one, you will have a good reason to be depressed. Media became so pervasive in Western societies that we often forget that it is not real. All the girls want to marry a rich and athletic lawyer, heir of a large family fortune. All the guys want to date that businesswoman with a hot body and a strong character, yet delicate personality. However, the likelihood that you will find that person is slight.

Have we become so obsessed with buying Gucci and Armani clothes to look like, and believe we are as happy as those people in motion pictures, that we forgot that this is exactly the objective of media corporations? They are not selling media content to you, they are producing attentive eyeballs, which will perceive the more than obvious product placement. The audience is not the consumer, it is the product sold to advertisers. Because television creates material needs, it is a powerful motor of consumerism.

And in societies where media are so pervasive, were they are actors of socialization, we come to see these unwritten rules about life in staged television as norms, prescriptions to which we shall all abide to. This fictional world, moreover, is incongruent with our lives. Being part of the working class does not mean that you will own a Black Berry rather than an iPhone, wear juicy couture apparels instead of Chanel, and study at Washington or NYU rather than Columbia or Harvard. No, real working-class people have cheap mobile phones, buy clothes during sales, and will probably drop out of school to work full time, not because it will add some dramatic effect, but because they have no other choice.

It is even more obvious in the case of reality television. What many viewers forget is that it only represents 20 minutes of their day. This illusion of reality is just as staged as in a fiction show. And they don't select average Joes, they only lock crazy party animals with hot bodies in a loft to keep you watching.

And yet, if we must blame someone, it should be ourselves. Because, after all, we are the ones  who watch their shows, who buy their movies, who read their romantic novels. We do not passively accept to be oppressed with product placement, we actively demand more of it. Because we feed our insecurities and desires to be accepted with media content and gratification of material needs; we feel like we understand these people, like these characters and clothes are our friends. Because, no matter how fictional it is, they don't judge us, and that feels real.